Microsoft to give away anti-virus software

[uky kozak]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8095932.stm

[bogeyman]

Interesting.

They'll be putting an entire industry out of business.

Hard to see how bundling a complete AV with Windows would not fall foul of anti-competition regs.

I think it's a good move, but I expect McAfee, Sophos et al, might take another view.

[NickFitz]

Interesting.

They'll be putting an entire industry out of business.

Hard to see how bundling a complete AV with Windows would not fall foul of anti-competition regs.

I think it's a good move, but I expect McAfee, Sophos et al, might take another view.

"...the software will tackle viruses but lack the broader range of utilities, such as parental locks, found in paid-for security suites."

So the AV vendors will be able to compete on all the useless cruft they've been adding to their products for years, which any competent user disables ASAP because it cripples the machine.

I wonder if this will lead to people realising that they've been buying snake oil all these years.

[Durbs]

Shame they are phasing out OneCare though as i've used it for a while and its very good. Its other features such as central backup, printer sharing and scheduled tuning are handy and but guess they'll be gone in the new thing.

As long as the new AV is as unobtrusive as OneCare then i'll happily accept the freebie.

[bogeyman]

"...the software will tackle viruses but lack the broader range of utilities, such as parental locks, found in paid-for security suites."

So the AV vendors will be able to compete on all the useless cruft they've been adding to their products for years, which any competent user disables ASAP because it cripples the machine.

I wonder if this will lead to people realising that they've been buying snake oil all these years.

Exactly Nick.

I know people who still swear by Norton, even though it's the biggest piece of superfluous garbage the software world has cranked out to date.

So-called 'utilities' and 'parental locks'. Gimme a break.

If the snake oil vendors can make a living off these offerings then they must have fiercely powerful marketing.

[TykeMerc]

Exactly Nick.

I know people who still swear by Norton, even though it's the biggest piece of superfluous garbage the software world has cranked out to date.

So-called 'utilities' and 'parental locks'. Gimme a break.

If the snake oil vendors can make a living off these offerings then they must have fiercely powerful marketing.

Mostly what they have is an ignorant and fearful customer base.

It's an unfortunate fact that much of the PC buying public wouldn't know how to download and install an AV/Spyware product if they had to. Since many PC's are shipped with trial versions of the big commercial packages a significant number just sign up and pay when they get spammed with warnings that the product will expire.

[futurix]

Hard to see how bundling a complete AV with Windows would not fall foul of anti-competition regs.

And that's exactly why they are not bundling it... the new product will be part of Windows Live suite of downloadable software.

[LazyFan]

And that's exactly why they are not bundling it... the new product will be part of Windows Live suite of downloadable software.

Which OEM's like DELL will have auto installed as part of their DELL install on top of MS. Or they will charge Norton even MORE to offer their software!

[TimberWolf]

What's the betting it will become more difficult to uninstall and completely remove the paid-for AV's from Vista.

[swamp]

Maybe Microsoft are worried that Joe Public will switch to *nix-based OSes because they don't 'need' anti-virus. Not to mention AV bogging down your system.

Microsoft have included file sharing, print servers, unzip utilities, firewalls and other stuff in Windows which have no doubt pissed off ISVs. Anti-virus is just another logical step.