So the author just replied below claiming that it wasn't PR hit. I don't actually believe that, but on the off chance that this isn't a PR hit then it has to be something worse: he did a bunch of googling, saw a spate of news stories about the death of AV (thanks, PR guys!), and was like "hey, the story here is the death of AV... I have a news hook!"
In other words, it was self-pwnage. He did the PR firm's work for them, and nobody at that firm even owes him one.
Also, whatever I might speculate, I do know this for a fact: a screenshot of that article is going on a PowerPoint slide and will be victoriously displayed in a meeting at some point soon.
Edit: Also, I wanted to stab myself in the eye when I read this howler:
"Because Netflix, a well-known innovator in the tech sphere, is the first major web firm to openly dump its anti-virus, FORBES has learned. And where Netflix goes, others often follow; just look at the massive uptick of public cloud usage in recent years, following the company’s major investment in Amazon Web Services."
So everyone uses "the cloud" (whatever that is) because Netflix uses AWS. I don't remember the last time I saw a reach like that on a site like Forbes.