We've all heard the anti-trust cases about Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player (did the latter become an actual case? I don't remember), but I think that Microsoft should win this. As someone said before, they, as the OS manufacturers, have the responsibility to secure that operating environment. This goes beyond just fixing bugs in the OS that *some* viruses (viri?) exploit, and into the realm of actually stopping these malicious programs from executing when Joe Bloggs in Accounting opens that email entitled "NUDE PHOTOS OF ANNA KOURNIKOVA!" and subsequently finds the contents of his C: drive disappearing into the void.
If Symantec want to return to the days when their programs didn't suck my computer's resources away, that's fine by me, but if they can't handle this competiton than they will, and should, die off. Let's not forget that just because it's packaged with Windows doesn't mean it will be awesome. I don't use Windows Firewall at the moment, I use ZoneAlarm instead, and I use AdAware and Spybot in addition to MS' anti-spyware program.
The bottom line, as far as I, and by the looks of it many people here, are concerned, is that, unlike the IE and WMP arguments, this is a security issue that Microsoft deserve to be allowed to solve. We didn't wait this long for MS to become this security conscious only to have it blown apart by competitors complaining about anti-trust.
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We've all heard the anti-trust cases about Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player (did the latter become an actual case? I don't remember), but I think that Microsoft should win this. As someone said before, they, as the OS manufacturers, have the responsibility to secure that operating environment. This goes beyond just fixing bugs in the OS that *some* viruses (viri?) exploit, and into the realm of actually stopping these malicious programs from executing when Joe Bloggs in Accounting opens that email entitled "NUDE PHOTOS OF ANNA KOURNIKOVA!" and subsequently finds the contents of his C: drive disappearing into the void.
If Symantec want to return to the days when their programs didn't suck my computer's resources away, that's fine by me, but if they can't handle this competiton than they will, and should, die off. Let's not forget that just because it's packaged with Windows doesn't mean it will be awesome. I don't use Windows Firewall at the moment, I use ZoneAlarm instead, and I use AdAware and Spybot in addition to MS' anti-spyware program.
The bottom line, as far as I, and by the looks of it many people here, are concerned, is that, unlike the IE and WMP arguments, this is a security issue that Microsoft deserve to be allowed to solve. We didn't wait this long for MS to become this security conscious only to have it blown apart by competitors complaining about anti-trust.