How so? According to McAfee, the problem only affected less than 0.5% of their non-enterprise customers. I'm sure only small fraction of those affected will decide to switch their vendor; the rest of non-technical crowd will simply ignore this.
> My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery.
> Just look at the release budgets for enterprise software - sales and marketing are at the top, while R&D and support are at the bottom.
We have actual data to debate this: McAfee's annual financial statement, http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MFE&fstype=ii.
In 2009, McAfee spent $839mn on SG&A and $325mn on R&D. Sure, the R&D number is less than SG&A, however:
- SG&A number includes administrative expenses, paying rent for buildings, providing customer support etc.
- $325mn on R&D is a huge number. Assuming fully-loaded annual developer cost of $200k, it's 1.6k developers working full-time on this product. I'm not sure how many open-source software project have similar number of at least part-time developers involved. Even taking into account "A Mythical Man-Month" etc. is still a significant resource.
Having a decent anti-virus product requires, among other things:
- Having full-time dedicated security experts - and by experts I mean people who literally have decades of experience in the field. You cannot become a security expert overnight.
- Dealing with thousands of different software/hardware environments at customer machines
- Regularly updating virus databases, monitoring threats 24/7 and providing rapid updates for every new virus/trojan
- Providing decent customers support to all of your non-technical customers who don't know much about computers.
I don't know how well McAfee handles all the tasks above - I'm not their customer, and not affiliated with them in any way. I just want to emphasize that anti-viruses are non-trivial, and there is no existing open-source business model today that can handle this complexity.