The announcement from M$ today:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-18NoCostSecurityPR.mspx

Based on some of the previous attempts from them along these lines, I'll not be holding my breath for this to be something fantastic.

I will be curious to see what this does to some of the other companies selling anti-malware products. Unfortunately, I think it has the potential to be rather harmful.

From my understanding, this is supposed to be a more fully-featured replacement for Defender.

I don't think that it will be harmful to the security posture of the individual user, hopefully quite the opposite if they start shipping windows with it enabled. I mean that this has the potential to be harmful to the anti-malware industry.

We've all seen what Microsoft does with free products when they are in a market with no competition, i.e. IE. Before firefox came around as serious competition, IE had stagnated for several years and turned into a piece of crappy bloatware.

If they start shipping this product as part of the default windows install, the average user will have no incentive to buy any other product, potentially killing the rest of the industry. However, defender never really went anywhere, so this may not even be a problem.

I agree with, and can see, the logic here. However most end users don't have an incentive to buy AV software anyway as most new PCs ship with Norton/McAfee/etc. as part of the 'package'. I don't see the MS version being any worse than this situation, especially when you factor in the that the updates won't stop when the subscription runs out.

If the 'free' MS version is a dog then those that know (or are advised by those that know) will continue to pay for whatever package is flavour-of-the-month, whilst those that don't know will carry on blindly regardless, as they currently do with no protection whatsoever.

Ultimately if my grandparents can go to a store and buy a machine that has good baseline protection out of the box (nothing is perfect) that should make my life easier. Less support calls from a personal perspective and one less bot spamming my servers from a professional perspective.

I can also see the anti-trust people getting edgy about Microsoft putting current AV companies out of business with reduced revenue. If Windows didn't have so many holes they'd be no need for AV companies in the first place. I'd personally trade less AV companies for more secure OSes.

On the flip-side, if Microsoft continued to do nothing about malware then they'd get grief for not taking action. They're taking action and still getting complaints. It's a lose-lose situation for them...

It's possible, but the only way I see this happening is if the Microsoft solution becomes the best in the business.

As you say this may result in the Symantecs and McAfees of the world moving from the consumer marketplace, but this could just as easily result in hem following the Grisoft business model of offering the consumer/stripped down version for free to ensure they keep a high number of installs out there for statistics and sample gathering (& beta testing) purposes.

Ultimately only time will tell and I'm becoming spectacularly ineffective when guessing which way the industry will jump

Yup, definitely hard to say what will happen.

something free from microsoft?

that's why i probably never heard of them.

except for the systernals aquisition.

and the powertools.

Another opinion piece on the MS tool:

http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2008/11/death_of_the_av.html