Spybot with its dedicated team always focused on spyware and anything directly threatening privacy, since there were already a bunch of good antivirus applications out there.
Over the year though, antivirus companies entered the anti-spyware field as well. Many of the major antivirus products forced their customers to uninstall Spybot because of claimed incompatibilities, which were never named, nor could be reproduced by Team Spybot, but caused many Spybot users to abandon Spybot involuntarily.
To make it possible for our users to have both the best anti-spyware and anti-virus protection, Team Spybot teamed up with the leading antivirus engine (found three times in the top three antivirus products of that years, and many more since then) and offered Spybot 2.0 with an integrated award-winning antivirus and real-time protect
Patrick isn’t really a fan of subscription based software for private use, but since we have to pay yearly fees for using this antivirus, paid yearly subscriptions for Spybot were created, named Spybot Home and Spybot Pro. True to the initial thought of everyone’s right to privacy, Spybot Free (just without antivirus) was of course continued.