Robert Vamosi has a nice writeup on the antivirus market following Microsoft’s entrance into it. It’s interesting that the massive company, with its marketing prowess along with the advantage of its desktop dominance, still gives anything away for free. But the security space is an unusual one:
‘McAfee and Symantec both had something Microsoft did not: effectiveness.

Almost two years ago, independent antivirus-testing organizations faulted OneCare for missing known malware. Andreas Clementi of AV-Comparatives.org wrote in his February 2007 report (PDF) that OneCare did not meet the minimum requirements for participation. “Due (to) that, its inclusion in future tests of this year (will) have to be re-evaluated.’

It seems that effectiveness and innovation still matter. While there may be a stripped-down free version of OneCare, the resource intensive app most likely still will not be picked up by users.
One of their statements has been that there are too many systems out there without security software, so they want to make it free. But that’s why Microsoft started the Malicious Software Removal Tool and its updates years ago. Their OneCare project, to this point, failed.

Our free behavioral-based ThreatFire continues to prevent two year old Parite variant infections on real users’ machines on a regular basis, so we certainly see and have been meeting the need to provide protection to users from systems that are unprotected. And its performance can’t be beat.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under AntiMalware Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.