As a bumper post to my last one, regarding the “Woes of Lenovo’s”, as Microsoft is collapsing and consumers reject Windows, demand for anti-virus products and utilities is dying off too.
Malwarebytes, a popular Windows anti-malware “suite”, has laid off 100 people.
This is after last year’s “strategic reorg” got 125 at the same company.
Rival Sophos laid off 450 in January of 2023.
Then there’s this article from December 2022. Lots of “cyber security startup unicorns” going under.
This article suggests that Avast may have laid off as many as 1,000 people in 2021.
Qihoo 360, a Chinese “security” company that owns Opera, laid off last year.
This is all with a cursory Web search. The layoffs have clearly been trickling for more than a decade already.
As Windows on the desktop plummeted from almost 95% to under 70%, and the PC sales are in the dumps due to “Chromebooks”, Macs, users switching to Linux, and “devices”, and the bad economy, less people are on Windows, which needs antivirus software.
Further, Microsoft’s decision to ship some baseline “thing” that you don’t pay for has limited what people who stick to Windows are willing to part with, cash-wise, even though “Defender” is comically bad and usually just stops you from downloading Free and Open Source software for Windows and goes off because a program used the open source NSIS installation framework.
Chromebooks and Linux are a lot more resilient to malicious software because the users and the system are not favorable to the whole Windows concept of “run this dodgy binary you got somewhere and pray it’s not attack code”.
I’d say a good 99% of the software I use, and maybe further, comes from my distribution’s signed software repositories, and the rest is at least verified to come from Brave Software or Flatpak.
I only have a handful of applications that I got “at the vendor’s Web site”, and I asked VirusTotal and ClamAV (an open source anti-virus that runs when you ask it to look at something) to go over them.
Typically, when a “security company” or even just a “company not exactly known for security”, like Microsoft, and their pets that implemented “Security Theater Boot” on Linux, start talking about Security, that’s either not what they mean or they mean they want to lock the system down from you, the user.
Regardless, it’s clear to see that Microsoft’s partners, who hate Linux because it would be the end of their business, are going under as Windows collapses.
All of these PC security problems are basically a Windows thing anyway, so the “Security” industry is tethered to an OS that gets a lot of viruses.
When they go out of business, nothing of value will be lost. ⬆