Submitted by Reuters reports that Microsoft is getting ready to unveil a free antivirus service for computers to compete with the many retail antivirus offerings on the market. Microsoft first made plans for its free antivirus offering codenamed “Morro” in November of 2008. At the time, Microsoft said that the service would be launching in the second half of 2009. The exact launch date of the new free anti-virus service has yet to be announced, but Reuters reports that Microsoft will “soon” make a beta version of the free protection available for users. Investors in security software firms like McAfee and Symantec are worried that a free offering from Microsoft could potentially harm revenue for the companies.
“Morro came out of an unsuccessful offering from Microsoft called Live OneCare that never proved popular among users. Microsoft said in November when it announced the free antivirus offering that Live OneCare would be phased out.”
If there is one thing that Microsoft is good at, its retrying failed attempts. They seem to do that consistently.
Maybe “Microsoft AntiVirus 7” will be widely accepted
How could Microsoft be able to protect your computer from viruses if it can’t keep your OS safe? It wouldn’t make sense to buy a MS antivirus. And it’s antiethical for MS to sell an antivirus: Sell the poison and the antidote!
You understand that there are many other ways to get a virus/worms in your computer such as social engineering or installing 3rd party infected applicaitons such as Kazza.
Its pretty difficult for OneCare to be successful when no one knew about it outside the technologically literate know about it. It sits in shelves but no one pushes it to the same degree as Norton or McAfee – why? because Microsoft never went into the retail chains and educate the sales staff and management about their products. If the sales staff don’t know about it, how can they suggest it to their customers?
Microsofts problem is crappy marketing and execution of new products – many of these new products are actually good but are poorly executed once it is handed over to marketing to take care of the rest.
OneCare is not a good solution. It’s always been rated lower than the major antivirus providers. The fact that it’s free will change nothing in the enterprise arena.
The biggest issue I have with this is extremely counterproductive for MS to get into this arena, instead of focusing the resources necessary to lessen the burden of having to run an antivirus app altogether. MS always treat these new ventures as an afterthought, they release substandard products and have enough money to ride out the market shift to making their mediocre products “industry standard”. To be honest, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened with Zune yet.
You do realise that *gasp* consumers purchase anti-virus and security software from retail stores? I am talking about people who purchase their stuff through retail stores – end users and small businesses (15-30 employees).
Go into any organisation and ask the employee’s about what security/anti-virus brand names they recognise and what they run on their home computer – whats the bet that next to none of them will mention Microsoft. Microsoft never got their name out there – so Joe and Jane Average don’t know about it.
Of course Windows and their products need to be fixed but when you have management and employees who are brained washed into the mentality of “legacy code is an asset” – things aren’t going to change. Until there are employee’s and management who are willing purge Microsofts code base of many years of cruft, clean up their existing code, and enforcing some coding practices through out their organisation and those who want the Windows certification logo on their product, things aren’t going to change.
Windows XP SP2 listed the unsafe calls and the equivilant safe call – why hasn’t Microsoft removed all their old unsafe calls? these have been known for over 5 years – if you haven’t updated your code in 5 years then quite frankly you should shut up shop, sell off your assets and get into another industry that accepts laziness as the norm.
Edited 2009-06-14 00:38 UTC
It’s a shame that Microsoft bought and buried RAV antivirus several years ago. It was a very good multi-OS solution that was ‘supposedly’ going to be used to clean after Microsoft’s mess.
Edited 2009-06-12 16:50 UTC
I don’t think MS intends to compete with Symantec, McAfee et al. Rather, it’s their attempt to improve the security of the Windows ecosystem by offering a free “better than nothing” solution to those who didn’t bother to take care of AV software in the past.
Sure, there are free products in the market already (Avira FreeAV, AVG Free), but many people don’t seem to notice them.
I’ve seen many PCs without any working AV solution – often running an expired version of Norton AV or the like that wasn’t getting any updated definitons. Maybe a free MS product could be beneficial for those people. Definition updates are going to be delivered via MS Update – and it seems to be common knowledge these days that installing Windows Updates is good and important.
Edited 2009-06-12 17:23 UTC
That for this to be fair competition Microsoft can not offer it preinstalled, as a part of it’s update service, it can’t include any links on the desktop or apart of the OS, and they can’t sneak it in any other way either. They can, like any other AV company offer it on the website, advertise it, etc.
I think that’s fair.
Where does ‘fair’ enter the equation? this is starting to get pathetic; when Microsoft includes a firewall they are labelled as anti-competitive, when they fail to include it they are neglectful. Then lets go back in time; remember many years ago when there were vendors selling TCP/IP stacks and then Microsoft has the audacity to include it as part of their operating system. How about VxFS from Veritas? should operating system vendors be sued because they have the gaul to improve their own file system and thus make VxFS no longer required.
Anti-Virus has gone from being an ‘add on’ to a must have component as part of the operating system; it is now expected to be part of it, right next to the fire wall, TCP/IP stack etc.
Edited 2009-06-13 06:42 UTC
Anti-Virus has gone from being an ‘add on’ to a must have component as part of the operating system; it is now expected to be part of it, right next to the fire wall, TCP/IP stack etc.
Only in the Windows world, I’m sure most people running MacOS/Linux/SquiffyOS don’t run Anti-virus. I know I don’t, wether that’s a good thing I dunno, but I get along okey
Presumably based on BSD or LGPL licenced software…
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=morro
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