There is vast amount of money at stake.

Not sure how MS is going to try and get away with this one.

Indeed, this should be interesting, SIW.

Still, MS is already giving away MSE (renamed Defender in Win 8) for free so I think the course of action that will eventually be taken will be to allow an uninstall of defender and an install of an AV of one's choice.

I'm glad MS is building Defender in on the pre-beta builds though.

I doubt. MS's burnt its fingers with WMP and IE bundled. So after N and E versions we might see D (without defender).

McAffee, Norton and the oem's in particular could be seriously out of pocket.

The oem's argue their take from selling pre installed trials ( largely the a/v S ) helps keep the unit price down.

If people realise they don't need to buy McAffe when it pops up after 30 days saying the trial is up - that is tens of millions of dollars.

I understand the oem's get most of it - don't know the precise figure , could be 75-80% , plus the same on renewals.

Do the math - Michael Dell alone sells 30 million machines a year.

If only 1 in 10 buy the a/v at $30 , then renew at $20 - you get the picture.

I have a suspicion it much more than 1 in 10 .

Hi, Aaron.

Can't say I've ever used MSE on my own machine (until now with Win 8 8102) but I have installed it on many other machines for others.

To me, the incarnation of Defender looks the same.

As far as disabling it, other than going into services, just as many here didn't realize it was even installed, I don't see an obvious way to fully disable it.

Doesn't matter if it can be done.

Fact is - it is included .

That is MS using it's dominance to erect barriers to competition.

I am not sure it is the competition authorities that will be the difficulty here - oem's and the a/v makers are more likely to scupper it.

I never used Vista, Aaron. I skipped over it and went to Win7.

Still, is that any more obvious than understanding Defender is now MSE in Win 8 8102?

One has to go to "Program Files\Defender\MSASCui.exe" to get to the interface. Otherwise, it's all automatic.

Really, what's the difference between MSE and the new incarnation of Defender in 8102?

I'm not attempting to start a fight here, just seeking clarification, Aaron.

How does one define a monopoly? Suppose MS decided to beef up its disk management console so it started doing all (or most) of the things now possible only with partition wizard/paragon and such like. Would that be monopolistic? It can be argued that creating/formatting/resizing/shrinking/extending/merging partitions is an inherent part of OS installation and maintenance.

I suspect it depends on who the affected 3rd parties are. Partition wizard/paragon chaps probably have neither the financial muscle nor the financial stakes to chase the issue. AV vendors are a different category.

Well, one way the new Defender is different from and would probably NOT be removable completely is that it is supposed to interface with secure boot on UEFI systems. Secure boot is MS's way of authenticating boot components which will apparently ensure that only signed and validated code makes it way upto the OS loading.