[boca]

Lots of talk about these security companies losing out to Microsoft. And you're right, history definitely suggests thats a likely scenario. Remember Trumpet Winsock? Novell netware? Netscape? or any one of hundreds of utilities programs? All allowed to survive for a while, then devoured as a subsequent release of windows incorporated their feature set.

I think they're rationalizing that these guys can mutate and survive. Microsoft thinks these vendors can move farther out away from the core feature set; instead of offering firewall and antivirus they can offer spyware removal, adware detection, email scanning, popup blockers, cookie cutters and any number of other worthless pieces of crudware.