[venning]

I'm assuming that Symantec makes money off of selling SSL certs which, again I'm assuming, they will make less of as Let's Encrypt begins to gain "conquest" domains over "greenfield" domains (those that did not and would not have held a cert without ACME and without being free). Of course, that assumes that a substantial number of paid-for SSL users switch to Let's Encrypt. Unless I'm misunderstanding, this may solve two problems for Symantec.

EDIT: I have no idea if LE's impact is of a "rising tide raises all boats" kind or a purely disruptive kind.

[gcp]

The DV business is dead but there will be a marketing push towards EV certs for business.

Symantec's problems are that they fucked up too much and have slipped past the "too big to fail" boundary.

[mrweasel]

There's also a niche market for more complex certificate solutions, like the one we saw stackoverflow required: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/04/23/stackoverflow-com-the...

It's just that those solutions require actual work and capable customer support, and I don't think that's a business Symantec wants to be in.

Still I would hope that their certificate business is taken over by someone serious about SSL/TLS/certificates. I would have for Let's Encrypt to become a monopoly.

[wfunction]

Their biggest problems seemed to just stem from their arbitrary choice to use subdomains instead of subdirectories. If they just put everything on the same domain (/sites/stackoverflow, /sites/superuser, etc.) then they would literally just need 1 certificate for everything, no third-level-wildcard nonsense. Not sure what this decision to have a gazillion different domains has gained them honestly. Reddit clearly manages to work that way.