Microsoft's Free AV App May Be a Non-Starter

CWmike writes "Microsoft is preparing to launch a public beta of Morro, the free anti-malware it announced last November, according to reports. Morro will use the same scanning engine as Windows Live OneCare, the software that the free software will replace and Microsoft's first consumer-grade antivirus package. OneCare is to get the boot as of June 30 (along with finance app Microsoft Money). John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner, has questioned whether users would step up to Morro even if it was free. 'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,' he said. 'Think of it this way. What if you smelled a rotten egg odor in your water and the water company said, "Sure, we can remove that, but it will cost you $50." Would you buy it?' Not surprisingly, competitors have dismissed Morro's threat to their business. 'We like our chances,' Todd Gebhart, vice president in charge of McAfee's consumer line, said when it was announced OneCare was a goner. 'Consumers have already rejected OneCare,' added Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of consumer software at Symantec. 'Making that same substandard security technology free won't change that equation.'"

Comments

Shouldn't they just fix Windows?

[yourassOA]

Microsoft make shitty pay for software do you really want to trust their free software?

Re:You gotta love it

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I suppose most Microsoft programmers are fundamentally honest, so they surely don't want to produce bad code. But they do, so they must possess a certain degree of incompetence. Do I trust incompetents to correct their own mistakes? If they could, they wouldn't have made them in the first place.

As for management, they are known to rush software out the door with critical bugs and huge inefficiencies because they don't care about good software, they care about sales, and when you work for a monopoly, product quality doesn't matter. Do I trust these people to spend time and money developing a free or cheap anti-virus when the crappy software they propose to fix is forced down consumers' throats anyway? of course not.