Some readers believe we're already seeing signs of Symantec's influence. "This sounds much like Symantec's current customer support system," a reader wrote in response to my recent story" about Veritas Backup Exec 10 issues. "The last time I called Symantec corporate tech support -- supposedly 'Gold' level -- about an issue with their corporate version of Symantec Anti Virus I got laughed at and given a bunch of nonsense by the tech my call was routed to. I tried to explain to the tech I was an IT support person, not an average user, and I knew better than the nonsense he was trying to give me. So he abruptly finds an excuse to end the call. This call was right after upgrading only one workstation to Version 9 as a test. Everyone in the office was e-mailed a semi-current virus of that time ... every computer that was running the Symantec Corporate Anti-Virus 8.2x stopped the virus or removed the infected mail message, but the one computer that was running Version 9 allowed the virus to be saved."

But other old Veritas customers say such problems were all too common long before Symantec over. "Similar to your frustrated Veritas user, I had an open incident for nearly eight months, and up until the last month, had to do my own troubleshooting," another reader wrote. "For a small enterprise this was daunting, and frankly downright dangerous to the business and to my own welfare to go without known, solid backups for months. It was more than a small headache to do CYA when that's what I paid Veritas for. Turns out in the end that there was a versioning problem with their Novell version as they prepared their disk-to-disk spinoff product. Eventually my former technician discovered that if one creates the jobs in just the right order the problem completely disappears, even in the old version. Thanks for the help, Veritas."

Veritas customers who are ex-Symantec customers don't like the position they now find themselves in. "We had to show Symantec the door several years ago," wrote one reader. "Getting rid of them was an expensive and painful process, but we had to do it because they simply would not and could not provide acceptable support for their products. So I'm telling my people we must start planning to get rid of Veritas now, because the quality of their support is going to deteriorate rapidly."

Veritas tech support doesn't win much praise either, though. "We have found tech support from Veritas to be so bad we no longer recommend them to any of our customers," wrote a network consultant. "There are a lot of other products out there, and the companies are not as arrogant as they are. I am not the only VAR that has had this problem and most of my peers that I deal with do not use them anymore. When companies start believing that everyone needs their product and they don't have to do anything to deal with their customers, the handwriting is on the wall."

And months into the completion of the acquisition, the same issues remain. "Problems with Veritas Backup Exec v10 continue," wrote a reader just recently. "Even recent product releases of v10 can't reliably catalog tapes -- either earlier versions or the current version. Plus many users experience regular failures of the Backup Exec Job Engine, which causes all running or queued jobs to fail. You often lose an entire night's backups. Not to mention massive security holes which require you to upgrade all your servers in between one night's backups and the next. First level tech support is in India and work from a script, suggesting stupid remedies, like rebuild your entire setup or recatalog all your tapes, and nothing you can say will cause them to escalate your call to someone intelligent. Hard to believe this is a market leading product."

So what do you get when you put two support organizations of dubious repute together? I guess we'll soon know, because the now former customers of Veritas certainly seem to be involuntarily invested in finding out the answer to that question. Post your comments and experiences on my website or write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.