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Will Microsoft Control the Anti-Spyware Market?
jasondubya asks: "With all the recent publicity of Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware product, I wonder if there will be any room in the market for other companies? After recent comparisons between with current market leaders showed large failings in their products, do they stand a chance against the behemoth that is Microsoft?"
Have people beta test commercial software for free... BRILLIANT!!!!!
Distribute said beta anti-spyware software with windows updates.... BRILLIANT!!!!!
Hook clueless users on our anti-spyware software... BRILLIANT!!!!
Sell the software as a subscription.... BRILLIANT!!!!!
Sell advertising company's the ability to have us take their software out of our spyware definitions.... BRILLIANT!!!!
with apologies to Guinness
This'll be no different from the Browser Wars. In that case, Microsoft bought Spyglass and used its browser, offering it as a free download. In this case, they bought someone else and used their AV products, offering it as a free download.
So far, there's not much evidence of any change in strategy. Enough so that several AV vendors are getting definitely twitchy. I'm not surprised. If they survive as long as Netscape did, it would be impressive.
Oh, and don't expect the regulators to step in, any time soon. It was hard enough getting them to do anything when the Democrats were in office. There is absolutely sod all reason for them to do anything now.
Finally, look at it from Microsoft's standpoint. They lost a court case in Europe, which harmed their share value and took a small nibble out of their pockets. With security being the current "watch-word", here is their big chance to take back some of that lost value. It'll also hamper European efforts to regulate them, as they can chown() technologies faster than the EU can ban them from doing so.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Obviously, if Microsoft's software is better than the competition's, they will dominate the market. Microsoft usually gets along fine without selling software that actually works, so with that in their favor for once they should do even better.
The real debate is whether Microsoft will still dominate the market if a competitor gets its act together and produces a product that works better than Microsoft AntiSpyware.
I think the answer is yes - look at the success of Firefox. Even mainsteam users are slowly learning that there are superior alternatives to Microsoft products. I don't think any new Microsoft product that's worse than the competition will be able to survive long.
This space intentionally left blank.
They already control the Spyware market, so logically they have the most experience with it...
Seriously, if MS's Antispyware app DOESN'T fail just as bad as the other products in the long run, then that's some pretty good conspiracy fodder..
1) Become market leader in desktop and workstation software, but allow tons of security problems to get exploited until the problem reaches epedemic proportions
2) Develop (or in this case, aquire and modify) additional software to fix the problem you created in the first place
3) Profit!
=Smidge=
I can't see it. Already people like us are accustomed to running two or three different anti-spyware products each time. I can't think that an MS product will be any more effective over the long term than either of Spybot or Ad-Aware, or the other variants.
Consequently even if you have MS Anti-Spyware running, you will double check with at least one or two other programs just to be sure.
Let's not forget that MS even had anti-virus built into an OS at one time, and it disappeared, had backup software built into an OS, and it disappeared, and has at various times tried to undercut outside vendors without success.
As well, it seems pretty obvious that the Bad Guys are going to find the security holes in the MS product very fast, and begin tailoring their products to exploit them. How fast can MS play catch up?
Three Squirrels
How much time does it take between:
Microsoft taking a stand on spyware because everyone griped about it.
-and-
Someone griping about it because they are abusing their monopoly by taking a stand on spyware.
??
Wouldn't it be nice if your grandma's computer had a firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware when she took it out of the box? It might give the back of my firewall a break. It probably won't happen though. People will get sue happy as usual with MS. I'm surprised ZoneAlarm and Blackice and those guys haven't sued about the XP firewall yet (even though it's trivial). The lawyers at McAfee and Symantec already have their game plan ready if MS bundles an anti-virus. Heck if the EU lawyers had their way in America my 2005 PC wouldn't even be able to play music when I took it out of the box!
As usual MS entered a new market swinging and everyone is crying foul when it looks like they have a hit.
One nugget of info can be gleaned by going through the process of installing their Spyware removal software. They mention that you have a chance to verify your Microsoft Software is genuine, and they *also* mention that in the future doing so may be *required*.
Think about that for a second. How many illegal copies of Windows are out there? How much money does Microsoft *not* make on those copies of Windows? They discovered a must-have software product (that I expect they won't charge for, other than the price of a copy of Windows if you're running unlicensed) that they can use to solve most of their piracy woes. It's clever, but I suppose it's fair.
The diabolical part is that once you install their Spyware removal tool, they have a perfect way to scare the clueless into removing software that they (Microsoft) don't especially like. When I ran it the first time, it identified winPcap and WinVNC (the *client*, for crying out loud!) as spyware and gave me scary warnings about wanting to remove them. It's only a matter of time before OpenOffice makes the list, and a lot of people will either accept the defaults and delete whatever Microsoft Tells them to, or will be unsure about how safe it is to run a given piece of software and reluctantly delete it.
There are a few companies I trust to give me a decent list of spyware apps to detect, and Microsoft isn't one of them. They don't want to control the AV market or the Spyware market, they want to decide for you about *any* programs you install on your PC.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
If MS does nothing, it's being negligent (I've seen 'criminally negligent' bandied about before) by leaving the OS so vulnerable to spyware.
If they *give away* a solution, they're being monopolistic against the existing or potentially soon-to-exist anti-spyware vendors (Norton, CA, et. al).
If they *charge* for a solution, they're being greedy/capitalistic/whatever by charging for something they should be giving away.
Sounds like a no-win situation to me.
But, consider the Firewall situation. MS ships a *basic* firewall, blocks only inbound, not very configurable, but does support Group Policy settings and is thus enterprise friendly.
This *seems* to have left a market for both corporate and consumer firewall software. Granted, there are both free and pay solutions out there for both.
Maybe that would please everyone? If MS's solution was free, and reasonably effective, but not quite 'everything to everyone'? It would really NEED to be enterprise-friendly, IMHO, since I really think MS should be on the hook to provide at least some form of protection/removal as part of the OS (like the ICF in XP, the disk defragmenter, hopefully some future Anti-Virus solution as well).
But, and the end of the day, if Company X can't make a cheap product that does Anti-Spyware better than MS's, there really ISN'T a market that people should be crying about the loss of. Remember, MS didn't drop a billion+ dollars into developing what appears to be one of the better solutions out there; they bought one of the existing product companies.
Players like Norton and CA (should) be able to compete if there's anything there worth competing over -- be it breadth of coverage (signatures, mutation detection, etc.), ease of use (particularly where removing the nasty self-healing malware is concerned), time to updates when new threats surface, ability to block/blunt new/unknown threats, etc.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I'm surprised it took them so long to become a player in it, not just the progenitor.