Microsoft partners fuming over Vista

Microsoft Corp is no stranger to antitrust skirmishes and complaints from competitors about unfair business practices.

But the latest fight over its upcoming Vista operating system pits Microsoft against an unlikely adversary: the security software vendors who are some of its most intimate partners in protecting its notoriously vulnerable systems from attacks.

As Vista’s planned release nears, the company is facing a backlash from such vendors as Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which argue that even the concessions Microsoft recently made to appease European antitrust regulators won’t do enough to help them best protect their customers.

“We’ve been talking to them for over two years on this issue,” said Rowan Trollope, Symantec’s vice president for consumer engineering. “And now (with) basically a very short amount of time before the operating system comes out, we’re not in a good position to provide that security to our customers.”