What happens when one of your favorite companies is bought by one of your least-favorite companies? (The image of a Symantec balloon is from a Brazilian blog.)

Well, you hope they overpaid, for starters. And in the case of Symantec's purchase of Brightmail, it's mission accomplished.

Symantec makes the Norton firewall and anti-virus tools that are so horrid I'm actually buying a new PC this week so I can get rid of them. Brightmail makes enterprise-class anti-spam systems, and has added a program to fight frauds like brand spoofing.

A great outfit, Brightmail, but $370 million for a company with trailing year revenues of $26 million? Even if it doubles that this year, and even if you're paying with stock, you're talking about paying over seven times revenues!