Symantec Introduces Security 2.0

So what do you do if you're Symantec and you realize that that Microsoft's investment in system security is almost sure to disrupt your add-in consumer business (as much as you would never say that in public)?  What Symantec introduced in mid October is the most creative response we've seen yet and is aimed at making a quantum improvement in the trustworthiness of the network and network based transactions of many forms.  In this case the high level reasoning is pretty sound. In contrast to Microsoft, Symantec has a brand that expresses security. And Symantec has a large population of paying subscribers with whom they have a non-trivial trusted relationship (know enough about the person to get paid regularly for the service). The idea is to build an identity service that provides real monetary value to both the business (e.g. a bank) and ultimately to the user. Realizing that even with their brand and customer base they don't have critical mass for this, Symantec has partnerships with other big companies. It's a most interesting idea although only time will tell if they can actually get to critical mass.