Thompson vs. MSFT. Dog Not Hunting.
Thomas Ptacek | June 28th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized
John Thompson, CEO of Symantec, on why he’s “not worried at all” about competing with Microsoft. (from NetworkWorld)
Microsoft is synonymous with a lot of things in the software and technology industry. Security is not one of them. And they’ve got a long way to go to demonstrate not only capability, but to deliver and build a reputation of being able to support a vast array of users in that regard.
You could write a long stream of blog posts about this topic. And you know what, since it’s a lay-up, we probably will. But I’m busy right now and I’m just going to say:
The cool kids don’t think this about Microsoft anymore. Microsoft claims to have spent billions on securing its software (and it may have, if you factor in the cost of slipping releases to eradicate things like integer overflows). But that doesn’t matter. Microsoft could buy a year of the entire vulnerability research community for less than $80MM, even at premium rates. That’s less than the cost of a mediocre security startup.
On the other hand, none of the cool kids hold Veritas, or for that matter Symantec, in much esteem. And I’m not sure what fleeing from the all-in-one gateway appliance market, tail between their legs, retrenching into categories that are inevitably going to be Control Panels in upcoming releases of Windows Server, says about their ability to spend their way out of that problem.
But what do I know.
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