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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.'"
As long as it doesn't suck as much as Norton (slow, hard to remove), I'll take a look at it. Right now I'm running ClamWin, and I'm looking for a better (free) anti-virus.
I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan out there, but this summary feels a little over the top.
'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.'"
How can you say that with a straight face? The difference between for-pay and free is huge. And rebranding can make a big difference-- look at the recent success of Bing, for instance.
Personally, I think people are aching for alternatives to the current big players like McAfee. I'm reminded of this recent slashdot story-
"'Security firms Symantec and McAfee have both agreed to pay $375,000 to US authorities after they automatically renewed consumers' subscriptions without their consent.' The two companies were reported to the New York Attorney General after people complained that their credit cards were being charged without their consent. The investigators found that information about the auto-renewals was hidden at the bottom of long web pages or buried in the EULA."
I think something that's free and easy to use can compete very well against this sort of customer abuse.
p.s. anyone else find the quotation by John Pescatore completely unintelligible? Either he's very confused with his analogies or was misquoted.
Microsoft, the virtual inventor of buggy bananaware and OS monoculture that enables mass distributable malware gets into the A/V market. Sounds like Typhoid Mary selling antibiotics...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
'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?'
This analogy is just dumb. This is a free product. Obviously the analogy would have the water company saying, "Sure, we can remove that for free."
Not to mention 'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,' which is a stupid point to make about a free product.
Furthermore, MS's security "problems" are over a billion installs. As we see every year when they tie Linux as the most secure system in pwn2own, they've got nothing to be upset about on the technical side of things.
And finally, "added Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of consumer software at Symantec. 'Making that same substandard security technology free won't change that equation'" is pretty funny from a guy representing a company that actually charges for substandard security technology.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm surprised a quote from this article didn't make it in:
How many people want all of their traffic explicitly going through Microsoft?
Right, there's no way you could have, say, a malicious perl script.
I have to use a bad car analogy. If I buy a BMW and it breaks down, I take it to the BMW dealer to work on it. Some people obviously opt for third party repair, but a lot trust the manufacturer, even though it is often design problems that caused the breakdown. I understand that people have unreasonable expectations that their purchases don't have vulnerabilities and will last forever, but the other 95% of the population recognizes that complicated systems need repairs and protection.
I don't know if this will be successful, but to think that it should not be trusted or immediately dismissed is ignorant. That being said, I don't use Microsoft products, largely because I don't like AV. Linux FTW!
If it's anything as effective as One Care, I'm going to stay away. I received a free 1 year subscription to One Care at a Microsoft event about 2 years ago and ran it until it expired. After removing it and re-installing my previous Symantec product, it detected around a dozen viruses and malware infections that One Care did not notice. Since then I've kept my distance from any Microsoft AV type product.
Launch every sig.
It works on everything I try it on! It works on Windows and Linux and Mac OS X! I just have to go to a web page and it scans my machine and tells me how many viruses I have.
"'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,"' Well, yes. But it is not just that. We already pay for Microsoft product defects in other ways too. Let's say you are doing a major rollout of Active Directory or Exchange. Sometimes, the only way you get a bug fix is to get a support contract from Microsoft or hire a company that has a support contract. Any Exchange administrator of a good size organization can tell you that Exchange has more than its fair share of bugs, and this new one, Exchange 2007, is no exception. Which leads to the question, where is the incentive on the part of Microsoft to produce really good software? Why not just produce mediocre software and then ask people to pay more money to fix it?
There's a type in the product name - they forgot the 'n' at the end.
Hope is the currency of fools
'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."
I think that analogy is broken. Very few malware use the holes in MS software these days. Most of the viruses spread by user error, email, IM, flaws in Flash/Acrobat etc. MS is offering a service to clean them up and does provide free fixes for bugs in their software. Obligatory car analogy, car company sells insurance for breakins and accidents and charges extra. Why not pay for it if the deal is good?
This space for rent.
Infected windows machines are a plague on the internet. Many of these presumably have no useful anti-malware running. Microsoft takes lots of heat, as the comments above prove. So Microsoft decides that trying to sell anti-malware won't work, but maybe giving it away, and I assume bundling it, will get it widely deployed. And take some heat off Microsoft for shipping vulnerable stuff. If this happens, and it works at all, it will be a great improvement to the current mess. To put it differently - it's clearly impossible to make an OS bug proof - so an OS ought to contain defenses against malware out of the box.
"I think that analogy is broken. Very few malware use the holes in MS software these days. Most of the viruses spread by user error, email, IM, flaws in Flash/Acrobat etc"
Defects in application or 'user error' shouldn't lead to the OS being compromised or the consumers having to pay the sellers more money to fix their defective product.
The water company advertised spring water filtered through volcanic rock from water frozen in glaciers milena ago. We called them and told them about the 'rotten egg odor'. They then offer to license a charcoal filter to us for $50.00 a year, to be fitter on premises at another $40.00. If we used any other charcoal filter, they advised us that we might be violating some other company's patents. They reassure us that if we buy their charcoal filter they will give us patent protection against getting sued by this other company. The water company hold a financial interest in the other company. They don't ever offer to indemnify us against getting sued for getting sulfur in our water. Even though they are the only water company that sells sulfurous water. The media invariable refer to 'sulfurous water', instead of $company sulfured water ?
As much I would like to bash Microsoft from time to time. latest AV-Comparatives report has them up there with ESET NOD32. With Microsoft you never know if that included some sums of money, but yeah.
I can't believe the biggest focus out of all this is on the "evolution" (or whatever) of their anti-virus, with little mention of the end of the Money product line.
I feel for all the people who have been locked in to MS money, like the one in the article. Hopefully it will drive him to open source... however I haven't really been able to find a good alternative to Money and/or Quicken for Home/SMB finance.. any suggestions?
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Microsoft has, for years, maintained three separate tools in this space (that I know of, there might be others). They change the names of them periodically, to confuse their hapless victims.
Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool
You gotta read this page. They release a new version every month. It apparently cannot remove viruses which are not actively running. Why is this tool not built in to Microsoft Windows Defender?
Windows Live One Care
This link shows a forum moderator, chastising a poor infested user for asking a question about a different Microsoft antivirus product -- Microsoft Windows Defender. Why are these separate products, again?
Microsoft Windows Defender
Formerly known as Microsoft AntiSpyware.
These should be one product. The fact that Microsoft maintains three separate products to deal with this problem is, itself, an indication of a very serious ongoing problem at Microsoft. As a company, they still don't take this seriously.
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