Thursday, November 20, 2008

Free, commoditization and Microsoft

Yesterday, Microsoft announced plans to offer free internet downloads for a fully configured (e.g. not a freemium service dependent upon a scaled down free version upsold to a full-featured service) anti-malware service; Morrow.

Great news that will, hopefully, spur Symantec, Trend, Mcafee to embark on an innovative path to offer great(er) protection, tuning, and remediation. Entrepreneurs, and their venture capital backers should be encouraged that a slow growth AV market will face greater commoditization than AVG or Avast could hope to accomplish and the established players will turn to M&A to ameliorate this meteor strike.

One Company, Reimage (where I am an investor), is clearly heartened by the news as they anticipate their rapid revenue growth will be buoyed by:

1. The cost of embedding AV in their offering has now dropped to close to zero
2. The opportunity to continue to build their affiliate network has now dramatically increased, while the cost should decrease.

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