Quote from nitro:
I don't know. But I can put the current situation in perspective.
Do you remember what Symantec's business was at one time? Remember Norton Utilities? It is more or less what made Symantec. Then at that time, MSFT decides it is going to put much of the functionality of NU into the operating system free of extra charge. Things looked really bad for Symantec, since the logic was that noone would pay for something that came for free already installed on their OS.
What SYMC did is to reinvent themselves into a new company by "foreseeing" the need for anti-virus software. Even with the success of NAV, SYMC continued to reeinvent themselves as needs became different as a result of the internet and the challenges is posed (firewalling etc).
Today they are in a similar position as they were back in the NU days. The difference is they have much more money and more experience. SYMC more than anyone else realize that the way forward is to continue to innovate through what is termed disruptive technologies. Outside of the computer itself, the internet is [one of] the most disruptive technology in the history of the technical world.
While I believe SYMCs challenge is great, imo they will come out of it ok. If you want to predict where they are heading, think about their recent purchase of VRTS and that probably holds the greatest clue.
nitro
Recently... 18 months ago.
MSFT is not the competition...
GOOG giving it all away for FREE is the competition.
A personal example about GMail...
Switched by business email to GMail over one year ago...
It's fabulous and FREE...
And after 15 months... I am getting about ONE spam/day.
So spam is pretty much a phony "artificial problem"...
Propagated by ISPs and the software industry...
In order to sell you "security software".
Nobody will ever make money providing backup and storage services...
Or pretty much anything...
If the Google Supercomputer... by far the lowest cost storage medium in the world...
Is competing with you.
In any given area of it's choosing...
GOOG can break even and force competitors to run at a loss.
GOOG's medium term plan is to give every adult in the Western world...
Free hard disk storage... and any App an ** average person ** would need...
Accessible from anywhere using a Google appliance.
Note this is not enterprise stuff...
Not a direct threat to MSFT and it's business sales...
Much more of a threat to the Symantec's of this world.