Symantec and Adobe complain over Vista

In the news, Microsoft’s Vista seems to have hit a snag even before it is released, with Symantec and Adobe complaining over Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior. Symantec’s complaint has been the inclusion of patchguard in Vista which stops software like rootkits meddling with the kernel. Their concern is that they require low level kernel access to prevent malicious code from running. While I understand their concern, I don’t quite understand what they are getting at. They cant possibly ask Microsoft to make less secure Operating system just to allow third party security vendors to earn their bread. I am sure if Symantec guys sat down and waited for the OS to be released, they will probably find a way to work with patchguard to solve the issue. Instead of churning out memory hogs with every update, they might as well try and create an antivirus software which attempts at minimizing the memory usage. All they’ve been doing over these years is to add several graphical bells and whistles every year instead of making a software that is efficient and light like Kaspersky.

And Adobe’s case is more like the age old Netscape-IE war. Since MS is developing is a new format called XPS, they feel that it might hamper the sales of their PDF software. I don’t know what is wrong in making their own format. MS is after all a software giant and they have the right to make softwares. People always have the choice of using a different software if they don’t like one. I’ve moved on from IE to Firefox long back. In fact I’ve never used IE as my primary browser. I’ve used Opera, Mozilla, Netscape because they all had tabs but never was a big fan of IE until IE 7 came out. So the software makers should stop worrying about MS is putting in their OS and start worrying about making their own software better because Adobe Acrobat reader has become increasingly stale with every release. I don’t think there are any new features added to it except for the security updates.

I think one should stop telling MS what to do. Nobody tells apple what to do. I think apple bundles its own software and tools with every Mac and nobody complains. Just because MS is the software giant does not necessarily mean that they will make the best software there is. And competition will survive if it is better than MS, like Firefox showed us.

You can read the whole thing here.

Oct 2, 2006
04:41

Anonymous had this to say, #1

i agree

Nov 11, 2006
21:57

Anonymous had this to say, #2

Microsoft gives Kernel access to 3rd party security firms.

Nov 11, 2006
21:59

Anonymous had this to say, #3

Ok the link seems to be catenated.

Read More Here

I guess this should work.

Nov 21, 2006
03:29

Dwarakanath had this to say, #4

ya.. about a month ago, MS granted access to the kernel.

but day in and day out, i think only one thing :

Norton sucks.. AVG rocks!

Nov 21, 2006
07:18

Jagadish had this to say, #5

This news is old guys I agree. I am currently too lazy to update my blog even though I’ve tons of things to write about but I desist to blog until blogger allows me to merge with blogger beta.

Nov 21, 2006
08:11

Jagadish had this to say, #6

And you have to really try Kaspersky. You wont even notice that it is around. It probably has the fastest virus scanning algorithm out there. It scans my whole computer in a less than an hour and my comp is full of junk.