My question is, would you run Windows 7/8 without any anti-virus software at all? Do you feel that comfortable? After years of Linux/OS X I can safely say that I won't use an OS that requires anti-virus ever again.
I used to run Security Essentials. When I upgraded to 8, it automatically uninstalled it. It's baked into the OS now, along with a constantly updated blacklist of known malware programs if you try to manually install something bad. You can get around it easily, but they don't make it intuitive to do so for users who are not comfortable clicking around and exploring.
Above and beyond being comfortable not using an AV on Windows 8, I would go as far as to say that if you are using an AV on Windows 8, you're being taken for a ride by your vendor of choice. And I say this as an information security professional. I've tried to get a virus on Windows 8 without doing anything more than what it takes to get a virus on Windows 7. I did not succeed.
I've had a single virus on a windows machine, and I was about 90% sure that it was going to be a virus and wanted to see what happened.
I don't run anti-virus software, but I think it's only the power users that are capable of doing so. User education is still too low. Would you trust your parents or grand-parents to "not install a virus" ?
Considering the kinds of vulnerabilities we've seen, this may prove difficult. I remember one where browsing to a folder with a specially crafted image provoked a buffer overflow that got exploited.
Man I really hate to break it to you but Linux (and almost certainly OS X) has many privilege-escalation bugs at any given time. Any executable you run on any operating system could potentially be a virus; the main thing protecting you on Linux is that the combinations of buggy kernels and buggy libraries are much wider than on Windows, which generally stays pretty up-to-date and thus consistent across many machines.
Don't pretend Unix-type OSes are immune to malware. Don't forget the Morris worm.
selling antivirus software is a lot less about fixing viruses than it is about convincing the average computer user that they are at risk without XXX antivirus suite.
