Symantec, the firm behind Norton Anti-virus, have decided to herald in the New Year by obtaining the much coveted Fraynor award for the technically embarrassed. Yes folks, Symantec beat all the other contenders for the first Fraynor award this year, nay this decade, by rushing out their particularly embarrassing problem on the stroke of midnight on the 1st January.

Such dedication!

So what have Symantec done to deserve such a prestigious award? They have become the only firm in the world to have a Y2K10 bug. Apparently, the erstwhile programmers at Symantec are all pre-pubescent and thus not alive ten years ago for the Y2K shenanigans when the use of double digit year numbers (i.e. 1999 would be 99) in dates meant that some programs would recognise the year 2000 as 00 or as far as they were concerned 1900.

Symantec have gone one better, they didn’t treat dates as numbers at all but as text or strings so when comparing years as strings 2009 is considered later than 2010. What makes matters worse is that Symantec made this blunder in the code of their enterprise-class product “Endpoint Security” which is supposed to meet a higher quality level as it is used on business critical devices.  Consequently, I predict Symantec’s business sales having a bad twelve months as System Administrators change to vendors who do not make such elementary blunders in their product code.

While Symantec have been quick to point out that the product still works and is still receiving updates despite the date problem (all updates have been delivered using the date 31st December 2009) the issue has caused other problems. Reports from users have indicated that the date issue leads to routine maintenance tasks that are normally performed by the program not occurring so temporary files that would otherwise have been cleaned down are accumulating and the servers running out of disk space.

Not Symantec’s greatest hour then but one that has earned them a place in the Fraynor Hall of Embarrassments. I do hope they enjoy the honour quickly however as their track record suggests they will not remember the award in a few years time.