Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
With the wreckage of Netscape, Lotus and Borland in its rear-view mirror, Microsoft now seems to have another group of software vendors in its sights, ready to run them down: anti-virus vendors.
That at least is the accusation made by Alex Eckelberry, chief executive of Sunbelt Software, which makes anti Spyware products. “It’s bad enough that Microsoft is getting in to all aspects of security. But now they are going to kill their competition through predatory pricing,” he wrote on a blog posting. The source of his annoyance: the pricing schemes for Microsoft OneCare, the security suite that Microsoft will offer for $49.95 for up to three machines, undercuts competitors such as Norton Antivirus and McAfee VirusScan by 44 per cent and 29 per cent respectively. On the enterprise side, which Eckelberry says is the most profitable, Microsoft’s Antigen product comes out at between 53 per cent and 63 per cent cheaper than rivals such as Trend, Symantec and McAfee.
Are companies like Symantec worried? We met Enrique Salem, head of Symantec’s consumer division, at about the time Eckelberry was composing his blog post. Salem appeared unworried by the threat: “OneCare’s capabilities aren’t anything new,” he said. “They’re working on threats that we used to focus on previously.”
Symantec, he said, was looking forward to the world as it will be, when almost every user will be online all the time, and will routinely expect that spyware, viruses, keyloggers and Trojans will be kept off their computer. The problem then, suggests Salem, will be in knowing what sites you can trust as phishing and “poisoned” sites grow.
· Charles Arthur
