> I think this is a pretty good example of how "Enterprise Software" will continue to quickly lose favor with customers. My personal opinion is that the "Enterp

> I think this is a pretty good example of how "Enterprise Software" will continue to quickly lose favor with customers. My personal opinion is that the "Enterprise Software" market is now more than ever about sales and marketing rather than innovation and and delivery. 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 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.