Microsoft isn't slower at fixing security vulnerabilities than other OS vendors. It turns out identifying and fixing issues in a piece of software as large as a

Microsoft isn't slower at fixing security vulnerabilities than other OS vendors. It turns out identifying and fixing issues in a piece of software as large as an OS is hard. Access to system features is not restricted by licensing, although I believe there is some source code which is licensed to AV vendors. Independent companies do write their own AVs without interacting with MS much at all besides some fairly basic driver signing processes which anyone who writes a kernel driver these days has to go through. MS does not have unique business reasons for shipping insecure code, and ships an OS which is as secure as they come these days in the form of the xbox. I used to work for an AV vendor and then the MS security team but now work for another OS vendor.