And those who had all their eggs in the basket of third party security solutions for Microsoft operating systems are now about to see a lot of yolks and whites on the ground.
CNet:
Credit John Thompson for having impeccable timing. Of course, the timing of his resignation announcement as chief executive officer from Symantec was purely coincidental, falling just one day before Microsoft dropped an A-bomb on the antivirus security market. But better lucky than good.
Microsoft’s move to kill its Windows Live OneCare PC care and security suite and replace it with free consumer anti-malware software is a big deal for the likes of Symantec, McAfee, and the other antivirus suppliers (though nobody’s going to say that on the record). Competing against free is always a tough sell, and this is no exception.
The only real surprise is that it took Microsoft this long to reach this point. But it’s in line with the company’s practice of offering for free the features that other application makers charge for. Let’s remember that back in the Stone Age, companies used to sell things like word processors and spell checkers. Know anybody in their right mind still paying for that functionality today?
Yes, if you use MS Office, which most people do, and most people think that most people must, you’re paying a whole hell of a lot.
Forget antitrust claims. There’s a world of difference between today’s announcement and Microsoft’s takedown of Netscape in the late 1990s. Microsoft is not the dominant vendor in the antivirus market. It won’t be bundling the product with the Windows operating system. Neither will it force anyone to use the application. There’s just no case to be made.
I agree. Microsoft’s attempt to secure its own operating system is not the same as taking down Nutscrape and other competitiors prohibited by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the tenets of just plain common decency. In doing so, they will have very similar products to third party “security suites,” that is, a combination of a firewall, and heuristical algorithms to delete and block viruses, rootkits and spyware, but those are things that Windows should have had by default all along, in lieu of a truly hardened OS. If the competitors have any glimmer of hope, it’s that Microsoft is the one writing Microsoft’s security solutions. By definition, most of the alternatives will be better.
