The Symantec perspective
Cris Paden is one of Symantec's three chief spokespeople on this issue. Originally from Oklahoma and with a charming southern drawl, Cris Paden sounds a lot like former VP candidate John Edwards. Except Cris is a lot more tech savvy.

I started off by asking him, "What the heck's going on?" I was getting into the southern thing myself, now being a resident of a red state and all.

According to Cris, the dispute was all about Symantec's concerns with Vista regarding security. He said Symantec had identified five specific concerns. He then went on to say that three of the five had been "Addressed by Microsoft over the past three weeks. All related to customer choice or lack thereof."

Of course, Paden didn't want to admit that Symantec also tried to get in the way of customer choice. Symantec has been suing Microsoft in an attempt to prevent the OS giant from shipping the product. If that's not getting in the way of customer choice, I don't know what is.

In any case, the three disputed issues that Symantec considers resolved are related to the firewall, the anti-spyware technology, and the Windows Security Center dashboard.

Paden told me, "Microsoft said customers would have to use their firewall and that was it. Microsoft has subsequently provided APIs so vendors can augment the firewall."

APIs are application programming interfaces and these are really the hooks by which developers gain access to the inner workings of the system. Symantec's disputes were mainly about the availability, or lack thereof, of various APIs.

Resolved: firewall
According to Symantec, the firewall that Microsoft has is just a one-way firewall (meaning it blocks certain traffic coming into your computer). Computers also send out bad data, especially if they've been compromised. What Symantec wanted to offer was a two-way firewall.

This may be somewhat disingenuous, since all indications are that Vista will have a very powerful two-way firewall. According to a recent InfoWorld article:

Microsoft is readying a new highly configurable firewall for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system that is designed to give administrators much greater control over which applications are allowed to run on the systems they manage.

Resolved: Defender anti-spyware
The second issue that Symantec considered resolved was Defender, the anti-spyware program Microsoft offers. Paden stated, "People were going to have to use Defender and that was it. By default. People would have to use it. Symantec brought media attention to it; Microsoft provided APIs. Issue addressed."

Resolved: Windows Security Center
The third issue that the two companies eventually agreed on was the Windows Security Center, the dashboard that comes bundled with Vista, monitors firewall, antivirus, and so forth.

According to Cris Paden, Microsoft said people would not be allowed to replace the Microsoft dashboard with one of their own choosing, like "Norton Protection Center". According to Paden, Microsoft said both dashboards had to run side-by-side (two windows on the same screen).