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EC Watching Microsoft Security Moves
Rob writes "The European Commission is looking into Microsoft Corp's recent moves into the desktop
security market, according to Symantec Corp, one of the companies that stand to lose the
most if Microsoft leverages its monopoly to compete. We've not filed any official
complaint," a Symantec spokesperson said. "We've responded to a request for
information from the European Commission... we were not proactive, they came to us."
Microsoft announced last week that it will offer an enterprise desktop security
package comprising antivirus,
antispyware, firewall and centralized administration. That's in addition to its OneCare
consumer offering, currently in beta."
First Adobe gets hit with integrated PDF creation in the new version of Word, and now Symantec is on the list of features Microsoft is going to incorporate in the next version of Windows. If there is anything they should have learned by now from the success of Linux, the benefits of allowing specialized developers creating software packages they know, understand and excel in doing properly, should have been clear to Microsoft by now. But I guess that's another thing that Microsoft think they can do better than anything else, what's new?
Exactly.
Microsoft's new anti-virus/anti-spyware should be called "Windows XP SP3" and it should be free. We didn't pay for software that almost works.
And if MS released Vista WITH the fixes, thus rendering antivirus sw/anti-malware sw obsolete, people on here would complain about "WHY do I have to pay for this upgrade to fix the problems they didn't in previous versions?!?". It seems with this situation, MS is damned if they do, damned if they dont. Damned if they do: Accused of trying to leverage out Symateic, damned if they dont: blasted for insecure OSes. Damned if they do pt 2: Put fixes in Vista software, and are accused of trying to gouge customers out of more money for an upgrade.