Symantec and McAfee double-team defeats Microsoft

Stan Beer
Monday, 16 October 2006 21:13

IT Industry - Strategy

The two leading security vendors have officially won their battle to force Microsoft to unbundle its Vista security features and give them access to the 64-bit operating system kernel.

Symantec and McAfee lead a charge of security vendors against Microsoft using Europe as the battle ground, where they felt regulators would give them a sympathetic hearing.

The two security vendors had expressed particular concerns that users would not be able to disable Microsoft's Security Center dashboard if the chose to run third party products and, thus, would be forced to run two competing security products - one from Microsoft - side by side.

Even more concerning, however, was Microsoft's refusal to give security vendors access to the Vista 64-bit operating system kernel which it has locked up using a tool called Patchguard.

Microsoft will give security software vendors access to the necessary APIs (application program interfaces) today.

There is little doubt that the backflip from Microsoft has come as a result of pressure from the European Commission, the antitrust regulator which has long expressed concern that Microsoft has used its Windows monopoly to damage competition in other software areas.