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The Netscaping of Symantec and McAfee
rs232 writes to mention a C|Net article about the uncertain future of the popular anti-virus software companies. "I mention Netscape because, if you believe Symantec and McAfee, a similar situation is about to unfold within the security industry. Microsoft, again recognizing late that it had failed to seize upon this thing called security, is now about to bundle its own security solutions within Windows Vista and further enforce new security policies that lock out some third-party security solutions altogether. Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape."
Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape.
I don't see a problem with that since I don't use either product and wouldn't mind seeing these two outfits go into the software oblivion. Microsoft will get lazy about updating the features on its security software and open source will come to the rescue with something better. It'll be IE vs. Firefox all over again. Ultimately, the consumer will still win out.
No kidding.
Norton, maybe. Norton Commander and Norton Tools were excellent, but once Symantec absorbed Peter Norton & Co., it was a quick downhill ride from there.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Next victim? Adobe: with its PDF and Flash.
Open sourcing these products, and creating decent interfaces for their PDF reader are the only feasible things [for Adobe] to do in my opinion. QT would be better than using GTK. You might wonder why: I cannot type or paste a link in the file selector dialogue of Adobe's PDF reader, in this day and age!! Think of it.
When your company makes a single product, you cannot complain when that product is no longer relevant. They should have diversified when they had the capital to do so.
Also, Symantec and every other virus scanner makes use of non-approved APIs in win32. They were not documented, and not approved for the use that security companies gave them. Vista is finally removing deprecated APIs and replacing them with documented, hopefully bug-free versions. They have said numerous times in their blogs and elsewhere that they will help existing companies convert existing API calls into standard calls. Symantec et all are complaining because they make such liberal use of these APIs that they are facing a huge challenge to get their product on the market quickly, if at all.
Note that one-time file scanners will still work, e.g., what your e-mail client does with received messages. That can all run just fine in user space. The pervasiveness of anti virus clients, though, would require complete administrator access, something Microsoft has been trying to get rid of for every day use (as they should!). If you allow Anti virus software to run in administrator mode while in user mode, you also open the door to viruses easily being able to do the same.
not to mention that signature based antivirus is going to die, and companies who do av/as right (don't let unknown stuff run in the first place, instead of trying to clean up after the fact) are going to eat symantec/mcafee's lunch (bit9, etc.)
Human activity and especially software in particular seem to follow a cycle of exploration and compaction phases. I remember when a disk defragmenter was an extra piece of software you bought (Blitzdisk on the Amiga). As time goes by, what used to be peripheral functions become part of the core operating system. This is a good thing. I expect a web browser, media player, word processors (even Notepad counts), and so on to be available immediately upon a fresh install. Microsoft is legitimately trying to improve their Windows product. They are improving their customer experience by folding new functions into the operating system such as anti-malware (or other nasties), and security (firewalls and such). This represents the compaction phase of the cycle preparing the way for the next exploration phase.
Shh.
Agreed. This is like abortion clinics complaining about lost revenue when condom manufacturers reduce their failure rate.
And no, the fact that in this analogy the end-user is getting screwed either way is not lost on me.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
No, however it may suddenly be much less of a priority to the QA managers to ensure that releases are secure, because any flaw may then bolster a revenue stream for Microsoft. And anyhow if they don't catch it in time they could just push a stopgap to their own AV suite which everybody has by default based on their intimate, insider knowledge of their own territory.
My tinfoil hat might be a bit tight, but this does stink a bit. At the very least, what's going on is questionable.
.....The best use of AV software for MS is as a short-term patch.....
The best use of an A/V patch would be not to need one in the first place. There is no need for such crap on Mac OSX. How many Mac owners run special anti-virus software? How about Linux users? Why can't MS make their OS at least as secure as OSX? Maybe they don't want to? Security should be built in, not added on by third party software. By reducing the number of services needed by most users and limiting their system access, Apple makes their OSX a much more difficult target in the first place.
All theory is gray
Netscape was practically Free. it's licencing allowed just about anyone outside of governments free use of the Browser. In fact, The only Netscape browser I can remember that had a Nag screen was 2.01, and Microsoft at one time was selling IE in stores the same way Netscape was.
Even under this situation, MS didn't start really gaining share until late IE4 Early IE5, and code quality was the reason Netscape started slipping market share. Not Win98 or Free browsers like Netscape would like you to believe. By that logic, Linux with Apache is just as guilty with doing Netscape in as Microsoft with IE, Since most of Netscape's money was made on Netscape's Web server software and not their browsers.
Navigator was absolute junk by the time Netscape was done with it. They kept claiming that MS was purposely denying access to windows so they couldn't code it better, well then explain why the Sun terminal I used to use at school had the same Netscape "crash after 1 hour use" bug that windows had, In fact, when they created mozilla.org and open sourced the thing, the first thing the Dev's for mozilla.org did was chuck the code and started from scratch.
Netscape could have saved their product, they could have diversified into other markets, they could have recoded it to work better, they could have did a ton of things, but in the end while Opera with their pay browser was still keeping their business going, Netscape decided that suing MS was the easier of all the other options. pure and simple.
Simply put, Microsoft did not Kill off Netscape. Netscape killed off Netscape.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Symantec used to sell compilers, developer tools, and even some user applications like ThinkTank, an early outliner. Microsoft pushed them out of the tools field on Windows; Symantec had a more portable alternative to MFC, and Microsoft didn't like that. Outliners disappeared as a standalone product category; Word now does that. All that's left is the anti-virus business. Now that, too, looks like it's toast.
Actually, the OS vendor should be doing the security system. The primary function of an operating system is security and resource management; everything else could potentially be an application. Only because of Microsoft's appallingly bad security does the anti-virus industry even exist.