Is not posting on a forum about an application a form of "word of mouth"?
Word of mouth is all well and good when people already know the product, but for new products, for word of mouth to spread, it requires a base of people to find out about it first, for which a website is useful. A bit like the whole "get firefox" campagn.
And I know you think that the mozilla suite is better, but tht's besisdes the point - you yourself have mentioned firefox as a good application, and yet it needed a shameless website to become popular.
As I said, sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the good and the bad, especially for inexperienced end users.
...and while we are all well aware by now of your opinion of symantecs Norton Corporate, and the pre-2003 thing, I'm not even going to go there as it's completely off-topic.