this is a very real possibility. it may not be the intention of most of microsoft but all it would take is one part of microsoft to drag its feet and we all could be vulnerable.

It would be great to get it free bit, I think MS would have to charge for products or we could get into the old Netscape antitrust question.

I think it is appropriate for Microsoft to deliver solutions to the malware problem. I think it is, as you pointed out, somewhat of a conflict of interest to benefit from vulnerabilities in their product--so the tools should be included with the O.S. at no extra cost. There can be no complaints about anti-competitive practices if they are simply covering their own quality problems instead of leaving the lack of quality as a revenue opportunity for other vendors.

Both Symantec and McAfee need additional competition, because their products have become mediocre-at-best. If Microsoft's moves "shake them up", the consumer will benefit.

While I agree it seems a conflict of interest, I don't think I would trust MS to deliver a gold standard product to fix holes in their own gold standard products. If they could develop the software to detect these problems, why couldn't they just correct the product. I would be more willing to pay for working product patches, especially if they identified what the patch was to fix, so I could pick and choose based on what I have installed, rather than the mega patches they deliver now that fix problems in much of the bloatware they have incorporated into the OS that I now have to go out and disable.

Let's look at the core issue, they are charging their customers to fix the flaws in their own product. The previous comment about Symantec and McAfee being "mediocre-at-best" applies directly to Microsoft. Let's look at corporate as a hole, charging more for less and less.

What they need to do is fix the flaws in their product or people will look and find something better.

It is a pretty obvious conflict of interest. A conflict of interest doesn't mean that you are abusing the situation. It means that you have business interests that have a conflicting nature. So yes they do have a conflict of interest.

That being said, allowing them to charge for a product that only exists to remedy problems that another of their products specifically creates is unethical. It should be put into the product for free as an underlying technology. (They should fix the wound not be allowed to sell band-aids) The implementation should not interfere with third party vendor's that protect against security flaws.

The anti-malware vendors should get court ordered access to the underlying code and APIs in Windows and shouldn't have to worry about the market being gobbled up by Microsoft unfairly competing with their internal knowledge of Windows. Microsoft should only be allowed to destroy the market by making it unnecessary by removing the holes in Windows.

Most people are blind to the fact that Microsoft intentionally crafted all the insecurities in Windows on purpose so they could exploit them at a future time as income streams. So I don't trust Microsoft to secure my system. I will always have a third-party to do that, to check Microsoft; a balance of power, so to speak.

It's also incedible that Microsoft is constantly breaking the law and no one in power holds them accountable and makes them pay the consequences for their behavior. Microsoft must have more politicians in their pockets than I have nickels and dimes.