[michaelawill]

Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.

[wyday]

Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.

[michaelawill]

People test antivirus software by throwing a certain number of virii at it and seeing what percentage of those are detected. This is their detection rate.

Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.

Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.

[MoeDrippins]

> Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!

[wyday]

That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388

[mahmud]

It uses 6 megabytes of memory

1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.

2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.

[wyday]

You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.

[SwellJoe]

Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Or better detection of viruses.

[wyday]

Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/