Given that the antivirus market is a market for lemons (quality is difficult to ascertain and the asymmetry of knowledge between the buyer and the seller is so high that it produces a broken market) and the software supply is so over-saturated that even the market is full of free products and an open-source alternative (ClamAV), I wonder when the signature collection and production processes will be shared between vendors. There has already been news about companies plagiarizing each other closed databases, so the need is already there. And there are precedents in other technology areas (patent pools, mobile network sharing) and even examples within the computer security space (DNS blacklists like Spamhaus), so maybe it’s just a matter of time and when the PC market stops growing, companies will resolve to pool their signature databases to a common entity and concentrate on more specialized aspects of virus detection (heuristics for *morphic viruses).