They’ve been building AV products for 22 years and started in the Czech republic. It’s now privately held by the two founders. They believe they are the most senior of the AV companies in terms of how long the founders have been active in the company.

They’re the #1 or #2 AV in the world – 40 languages, 125 million users. The US is the largest market for revenue and the second largest for the free version.

The interesting thing is that they are community based. They distribute the product for free and it is “every bit as good as paid AV”. The community becomes malware collectors and enables them to see viruses around the world instantly. The community also does the marketing by referral – 3 million users per month. The community also provides online support as volunteers (some have posted as many as 20,000 replies). The community volunteers also help develop the localized versions.

A user can install the free product and a few weeks later is prompted to register. It expires after a year and the user is prompted to either renew the free version or buy the not-free version. Premium versions add sandboxing (“for geeks”) and there is an Internet Security Suite that adds a 2 way firewall and anti-spam. The free version is good enough for most. They recommend the premium version with firewall for online transactions.

The free version does a lot, detecting malware, rootkits, and also doing reputation ranking on websites.

There’s also a complete set of corporate products – desktop, servers, email – all with an enterprise class management GUI. In September the new version comes out with a focus on SMB usability. It’s a completely new management environment. The client version will also have full sandboxing capabilities.

The client product gets refreshed every January and they’re adding some cloud features for delivery of signatures and crowd sourcing website reputation. There will be extra protections for online transactions such as complete sandboxing – it in effect turns the sandbox inside out and creates a complete safe environment so it doesn’t matter if the machine is infected.

They support Windows (back to 95) and have Mac and Linux products. They also support most mobile OS’s but not Android right now. RIM and Apple lock down their environments so viruses aren’t a big worry, but Android isn’t locked down at all. Mac and Linux are managed just like Windows.

There’s white listing and black listing in the corporate version for apps and websites. They provide a big list and it can be customized. Also has heuristic analysis and is not just signature based.

The client is fast and lightweight which is good for netbooks and older PC’s (ie, the consumer market).

Summit Partners just invested $100 million in the company as a minority stake. They see the company as profitable and well-managed and will help AVAST move to “the next stage”. They have a lot of operational experience so this is about more than raising money. They see value in the free version and will continue to build the company. This isn’t like a startup that needs funding, they’re just going to the next level.

Vince did say something interesting:
“Macs aren’t any more secure than Windows. They are just fewer users so it is a smaller target. There’s no reason to attack such a small footprint [yet].”

Today I downloaded and installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 and Windows 7.
It’s not the most exciting day yet I feel tomorrow holds great promise.

I can’t wait to check out more group policy stuff, especially AppLocker and BitLocker.

Today I began testing Faronics Anti-Executable. I’m very early in the test process. I’ve basically only built the environment on a bunch of Windows XP Pro SP3 and Windows Server 2003 virtual machines and installed the app.

Now comes the fun part. Playing around until I break something.

I’ve been a fan of Windows since version 3.1. After playing with LOGO and Mac systems as a grade-schooler and then trying to work in BASIC (sans hard drive, no less), I met my first Windows 3.1 machine late in high school and suddenly everything made sense. Here were screens that showed me my files, let me visually navigate to find areas I’d always known existed but couldn’t intuit, gave me access to settings I hadn’t even hoped for yet. It was tremendously exciting.

As if that weren’t enough, along came the Internet just a few years later. If I couldn’t figure out something on my Windows PC, someone on the Internet could help—usually by having posted the solution before I’d thought of the question. Answers without human contact!

Yadda yadda viruses yadda spam yadda yadda computers so easy your dogboy cousin can ruin everything in a single bound later and Microsoft has now contorted the OS around the average user, who quite needs to be saved from himself. In many cases, this is a-OK with me. Keep my dad from deleting his C: drive, you betcha.

But I beg Microsoft—I dare Microsoft—to explain to me the modifications in Vista, and perpetuated in Windows 7, that keep me from opening an Word document and an Excel spreadsheet at the same time.

Try it: Go to Explorer and select two files of different types, then press Enter. Or right-click and look for the “Open” choice. No dice—and no hacks, as far as I can find. XP did it. Windows 2000, 98, even Me did it. Er, I think. In Vista it doesn’t matter if you’re a standard user or an administrator, or even if you have super-secret Adminitrator privileges. You can’t be trusted to open more than one type of file at a time. Microsoft said. A Microsoft forum moderator came up with some code that was supposed to work; it let you enter some code and point the context menu’s Send To at it. In theory you could select multiple files, right-click, choose Send To, then the shortcut to your code—an annoyingly large number of steps but at least they didn’t involve opening a file, switching back to Explorer, opening another file, switching back, etc. In theory, that is—it didn’t work.

The reasoning, by the way, is that opening too many files (2) of too many different types (2) at once can strain system resources. (While you can open two files of the same extension simultaneously, you cannot open a .doc and a .rtf at the same time, assuming they both open in the same application.) By the time Vista was released to tbe public, 1GB of RAM was the minimum most users would tolerate in a new machine. The budget home Dell desktop had 2 gigs. Your average home user couldn’t have strained his system resources if he’d tried.

I won’t go into the Explorer view settings issues in Vista. They’re a plague, and fixes don’t stick. If you change one folder view to Tile from Detail, expect random file view changes in every other folder. But you know, that’s cosmetic. Very, very annoying but cosmetic. How about the status bar, which likewise doesn’t always stick, which never displays a folder file size total, and which rarely if ever displays a selected file size total. Who is this helping? My most fevered imaginings come up blank. But nearly every day, when I load up a USB drive with various everyday files, I’d really, really like to know how close it is to full.

While I was happy enough with Vista, plenty of other people weren’t. I rather assumed Microsoft would rectify these terrible, awful, unfixable problems in reevaluating the code for Windows 7. I certainly made them aware of my dissatisfaction, as I’m sure others did. What could the developers have been thinking? These were stupid, stupid decisions.