Microsoft’s Morro antivirus service—no, not Live OneCare, their other soon-to-be-terminated antivirus deal—is hitting beta “soon,” before it launches at the end of the year for free. You and I are laughing. Symantec and McAfee, not so much.
Live OneCare mostly bombed out because you had to pay for it—Morro is free, and if it’s good enough to protect people against the most common nastyware, who’s gonna 40 bucks to Symantec for the latest Norton? People like cheap stuff if it’s good, but free stuff even better if it’s decent—so Symantec’s Consumer division president Janice Chaffin crowing to Reuters that “A full Internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected” is highly amusing.
The one real saving grace for antivirus software makers is that Microsoft isn’t bundling Morro with Windows—probably only because they can’t, what with the constant threat of antitrust issues that in part lead them to yank other native apps out of the OS. I’d argue that security is a pretty fundamental component of an OS, so if there’s any app Microsoft should be allowed to bundle, it’s security software.
Maybe it is better this way—you’ll be able to download it for free if you really want it, like other Windows Live apps. But then I wonder if a bundled Morro could’ve saved Adam, so we’d still have one more cranky Windows guy in the world. [Reuters]
Thomas Hambleton
June 11, 2009 at 12:15 PM
It’s unfortunate how the anti-trust hoops Microsoft have to jump through make their products poorer. Look at all the goodies Apple are able to bundle in with OSX, purely because they don’t have a huge market share like Microsoft do. I too would argue a security suite is a fundamental part of an operating system, particularly one that has a reputation for being insecure and 99% of virii are targeted at it.
Report PermalinkWhy shouldn’t Microsoft be able to fix this problem for themselves, from first install?