One question comes to mind inmediately. Why buy antivirus technology from this little-known company and not Kaspersky, Symantec, or any other of the "big guys"? Well, maybe the price was right. Or maybe there was another reason.

Gecad describes itself as the creator of "the unique platform independent antivirus scanning engine".

In fact, the company offers virus protection for Linux file servers, AntiVirus, AntiSpam and Content Filtering for Linux mail servers. Gecad was also committed to supporting IBM mainframes as well as Novell's operating system and Groupwise softwarez.

It will be indeed most interesting to see what happens to all this "multi platform" product line after being acquired by Microsoft.

The press release doesn't bode well for current Gecad customers using Linux, mainframe or Novell solutions: "GeCAD will continue to expand its services and security business and develop new non antivirus related technologies and software solutions."

In case you missed it, "new non-antivirus related" seems to indicate the death of all cross-platform GeCAD products, which now belong to Microsoft.

Early this year, Microsoft snagged Connectix VM technology, which was one of the few products that allowed OS/2 users to run 32-bit Windows operating systems in a window under OS/2, effectivelly killing its OS/2-based windows virtualisation product, called Virtual PC 5.1 for OS/2. Without a product to sell, its CEO admitted that would close.

Two years ago, Ballmer and Co. told Wired that "Linux was going down" and cited "lack of key enterprise elements" and " lack of system management software". I guess that if reality doesn't fit your predictions, you have to change reality to fit your prophecy.µ