Have you seen cable TV in the past five years? It's gone so downhill. Half of the content is still in 480p, awkwardly stretched to wide-screen. Commercial breaks seem like they're twice as frequent as they used to be. Shows being aired have drifted even further into reruns-and-reality-TV territory. Even the content of the ads has shifted somewhat, from recognizable brands to injury attorneys who look like they filmed the ad themselves.

You can see the money being drained from the husk of an industry, and you can see the increased desperation as they try to scrape together what money they still can. The same thing is happening with antivirus software.

Another thing to think about is that tons of features that were never added before, are in the products now. Basically being pushed by management because more features = more sales, even if it ends up bloating the product. I remember a few years ago when we were acquired and had to switch AV vendors to McAfee, it made our oldest group of hardware basically unusable (and these were basically kiosk-type machines). The application we were using required IE so we couldn't replace them with Linux machines either.

Through instead of sloppy I would say it's often more on the line of misguided about what is secure and _overconfident_ about their own skill to write code without security vulnerabilities. And if the are no vulnerabilities no sandboxing is needed right (sarcasm).

Through there where and hopefully still are exceptions to this. But don't ask me which ones because I haven't been on Windows for a long time.