I say this to many people. If the definition of a virus or malware is something that hinders performance and functionality of your computer, then most commercial AV products fit the bill. They have a massive footprint, stop you doing normal things, constantly interrupt you and generally are impossible to remove completely.
It staggers me how competition in the anti-virus market gave us so many bad products. Even the ones that started out good slowly morphed into expensive bloatware. Security Essentials was the first step against that trend, and I'm happy to see it go all the way.
> It staggers me how competition in the anti-virus market gave us so many bad products.
They all suffer from the problem of "This rock keeps tigers away." A large proportion of AV instances never incur any malware at all; it gets stopped at the corporate firewall level or the users just don't browse to any infected sites. So how can you tell that the AV package is even doing anything? It must keep itself in the user's face to seem productive, or else that AV package will lose sales to a competitor that looks like it does more.
You know all those email taglines "This message was scanned by Norton AV" or whatever? Those are trivially fakeable and carry zero security meaning, or even worse than zero in tricking someone into falling for a fake. Their presence is obvious when you understand what they really are: advertising for the AV package.
Security Essentials is the first AV package that's not motivated primarily by sales, so it has the ability to stay out of the way where commercial AV products can't. (Why does MS Security Essentials exist at all? I recall one MS blogger, probably Raymond Chen, mention in passing that MSSE was created to reduce Microsoft's own support workload, as a fair number of support tickets with Microsoft are caused by malware.)
It staggers me how competition in the anti-virus market gave us so many bad products. Even the ones that started out good slowly morphed into expensive bloatware. Security Essentials was the first step against that trend, and I'm happy to see it go all the way.