thanks to everyone for chiming in on this thread! as a product guy at symantec, it's great to see all the thoughts, praise, gripes, etc. (ok, so maybe it's not so fun to see the complaints, but it is helpful nonetheless). it was interesting to see the comment that we're working on 2010 "already"-- we've been conducting research for next year's products since May :-) this is really the busiest time of the year for us as we are still launching the 2009 products and yet are deep in the process of planning 2010.
i'm going to try to recap a few things i saw here rather than reply to each one directly. apologies if this makes it a bit more confusing.
on the topic of security inspector, it's still around as a separate download:
http://www.nortonlabs.com/. this is similar to what we've done with other features in the past where we moved them out of the core product but continue to offer them as "online features" of sorts. we admittedly could have done a better job of making this clear.
a couple people have requested "HIPS" (behavior blocking) or full integration of AntiBot or ThreatFire. we made big strides in this direction with 2009 and you can expect us to continue in that direction. we've also got some other ideas in mind that are a little less "conventional" (and perhaps even more effective) when it comes to protection technologies for 2010.
we hear you on 64-bit support (right-click scanning, SONAR Advanced Protection, etc.). you may not have to wait until 2010 to see improvements in this area. sorry to be a little cagey, but suffice to say 64-bit parity is a top priority for us.
recovery tool-- you're looking for it to be more visible in the product, correct? we're working on this now. if you purhased online you should have a link to the tool in the "thank you" / confirmation message you receive after purchase. alternatively, if you bought a little yellow box from retail, it's right there on the CD itself, we could fit it on the disc after the Jenny Craig treatment we gave the 2009 bits.
"cloud computing" - just because we're not making a lot of noise about it, doesn't mean that SONAR doesn't use cloud intelligence today :-) we're just not using it in the same way as some of the other players, at least for now. we use Insight and our back-end intelligence for false positive mitigation during the process of determining whether or not to convict a suspicious application.
thanks again for all the feedback!
--dave
