Can crowd-sourcing give Symantec an unmatchable advantage over smaller competitors?

First, the story so far:

On June 26, I installed the beta version of Microsoft’s Security Essentials* - a free program that’s essentially Microsoft’s $99 OneCare with the backup and tuneup options stripped out. Microsoft poached some of the biggest AV brains on the planet to create it, and so far it’s kept me virus free, and my bank balance looks no lower than normal.

My theory: all the big names in antivirus software do a more-or-less equally good job at keeping out net nasties. That being the case, you should choose your solution based on useability (and the pared back Essentials is fine in that dept) and price (free - and better, free of licensing headaches is nice).

AVG is another free security software program I’ve used with no problems. And AVG is a shrimp compared to market leader Symantec.

How can Symantec win back lazy, cheap and contented people like me?

By turning its scale to its advantage.

Symantec has already chased down AVG (and the like’s) advantage in speed, managing to keep its AV and security program’s various bells and whistles while paring them back to a similarly minimal system footprint, and reducing performance drag.

But AVG, Microsoft and the like won’t be able to copy Symantec’s latest trick: crowd-sourcing.

In brief, around 40 million of Symantec’s customers have agreed to let the company keep tabs (anonymously) on which files they download, and which files they cause trouble.

Symantec’s new service - Quorum - taps this collective wisdom. Before you download any given file, Quorum checks its community rating, derived both from how many people have downloaded it, and the trouble it’s caused, or not. You get a mini report on a file’s progress so far. The authority of the source of the file is also a factor. Apple, for instance, has never distributed malware, meaning iTunes 9 almost instantly went onto the white list.

It’s a neat trick, and one that Symantec’s rivals can’t replicate - at least on the same scale; and when you're crowd-sourcing, bigger is always better. McAfee, its closed competitor, has roughly half the number of registered customers; Microsoft’s OneCare never caught on with more than a single digit percentage of the market.

Symantec has actually been rolling out Quorum on the quiet over the past couple of years; it’s just that it’s only now that it’s going to make its presence explicit with the new version of Norton Internet Security.

The community bands together under the Quorum model, which does hold a certain appeal. I’m going to try it.

Incidentally, Symantec itself has decided to get more assertive against ISPs that host malware.

“It’s time we stopped being just a security guard and picked up a pitch-fork,” in the words of one of the company’s Asia Pacific consumer product manager David Hall.

Case in point: Symantec collected evidence that allowed the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to issue an order to shut-down rogue web-hosting company Pricewert.