bill - 5:13 am on Nov 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

If MS puts this free stuff in the box people won't want to pay for Norton.

...and that's a bad thing? Symantec's bloatware is hardly something I'd recommend these days. Maybe this might light a little fire under them to get their act together.

That's how it started with Internet Explorer and Netscape.

Yeah, and now we have FireFox...

I was there at ground zero at Lotus when MS gave away email and nuked an entire industry

...and at the same time I was stuck in the trenches at company that forced the Lotus Suite/Notes on thousands of poor staff. Lotus had a huge edge over MS in Japan. Good riddance to that package. The MS product was infinitely better on the user end and much more preferable from the Admin side of things IMHO. (Certainly no disrespect to your contributions intended BILL)

Sure MS steamrolled over a bunch of companies. I don't agree with it all either. I just don't think that in this case you'll see history repeat itself in the way that you're predicting.