It’s interesting how one AV product suppress the other in just a matter of months. Look at the graphs produced by those so called independent testers. A sample here. Its a big war of AV companies out there.
My problem is, it’s sickening to know that we as consumers are always confused with all their gimmicks about free vs premiere/paid editions. You cannot do that with security products! <period>. Give it for 100% or don’t give it at all.
My take on it is, if you want to give something free, give it 100% (and the world shall love you for it). Tearing down features for free Vs. full versions is like saying “you get the car for free but the brakes work only 50%. So be careful. If you want full braking then you need to pay”. This is their message and how i see it. This is also why the open source world keeps propelling and gaining mileage. They fall under the GPL which do not allow licenses to be sold, so how they profit? Professional support and services…
Know this…I am not talking about features, that’s different, maybe your security product perform system wide application update, now, that’s a feature, security such as filtering through different protocols, email filtering, web filtering for example, shouldn’t be a “paid” feature..it should just be a standard one.

Anyway, Microsoft will also soon be in the chase, prime time. Its called MS Security Essentials dubbed Morro- a new free AV for PCs (they stopped beta test downloads already so its getting ready for RC).

Combined with Security Center, Windows Update, MS Firewall, its almost a full desktop security suite. However, it’s yet to get the real world challenge, this is a fact. So, wait till it releases and we shall all see. (Word to note, HOME PC…) So, not sure where this is going for corporations, yet.
From a commercial point this service will seriously dent the rest of the commercial AV market, no doubt, but again, i would rather get an AV at 100% free than of those “free but we wont give you 100% brakes” ones…This is good for consumers, the competition will ease of our pockets for sure.
I bet there will be certain camps that will say its from Microsoft, we can’t trust bla bla, just so you know, MS products are seriously “tested” (ie smothered and smacked) by millions of testers worldwide as soon as it sees daylight, every second, even at the point i am writing this, this is why you get lots of “bugs/problems” reported, so effectively, for me, as security paranoia, i rather have those bugs exposed, fixed than have/use a product that no one knows if its a big ass Swiss cheese or not. I don’t really care about the games the corporations play, i just want good quality software.