A dying giant !

[minthaka]

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft to offer free security
It seems that MS is going to offer more and more free programs to protect its OS. "Everything is free, just stay with us, please!"

[kopf1988]

I always love hearing the people who say "Wow, so we have to pay you to protect the vulnerabilities you created?" when they hear about things like Windows Defender. They _should_ offer free programs to protect their OS... after all, people pay hundreds for it.

[bigtomrodney]

This is one thing I'll defend Microsoft on. I felt the same when Vista was being built and the new kernel security meant that the AntiVirus vendors couln'd go full kernel mode.

The way I see it, anti-virus is not a necessity - or at least it shouldn't be. Microsoft's poor architecture over the years made it something that was required. Basically they made a mistake and Norton/Symantic/McAfee etc. cashed in on it. To me the antivirus companies aren't entitled to anything, they made their money on opportunity (which is fair enough) but that opportunity is drying up. But sure we'll be hearing about the antitrust suits when this comes out...

That's how a the free market works. My only doubts in this is whether Microsoft is going far enough in that they shouldn't be using a patch mentality and should be changing the architecture to prevent these flaws in the first place.

[Tainted_Girl]

Wow, free security. It should be free considering how Microsoft only sells crap. If you had Linux you wouldn't need this garbage.

[b2bwild]

MS earns most of it from MS Office and Server edition, not their OS.
Vista is already failed.
Vista is just a fat ugly girl, eating your RAM like french fries and using cheap cosmatics to look pretty.
Free Products is just a start from MS, as the Global economy crisis affecting most. Most of people are cost cutting in buissness and they want to spend on expensive products.

[smolloy]

That's how a the free market works.

Agreed, but the issue with MS is that they have a huge monopoly on desktop software, which gives them the power to put people out of business very very easily (remember how they won the browser wars?).

This stifles competition and goes against the idea of a free market.

Basically, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they fix the whole virus/rootkit mess, then they're sued to death by Symantec et al (with assistance from the EU and US governments), and if they don't then everyone complains that they put out such a vulnerable OS.

They can't win.

Personally though, I pretty much agree with you. I think it's the OS's job to be secure, and that's just tough luck for Symantec, McAfee, etc.

[kopf1988]

In a perfect world, each OS would be used more equally. Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Microsoft is a monopoly already, and probably needs taken down already. But, then again, their money does go into a lot of research and a lot of jobs, so that's always the negative.

[aluminumspleen]

I believe that it is an OS's responsibility to its community of users to deal with these vulnerabilities, either with patches, anti-virus software, or just a reworking of the internals of the system. I mean, I don't want to go out and buy a brand new pair of jeans if it has holes in it already, and have to buy the fabric or whatever to fix the holes. I mean, if an OS can realize that "Oops, I'm totally screwing over my users here, here, and here" they should do something about it themselves instead of leaving it to third-party applications such as Symantec to deal with at a large bill.

And yes, I know, in today's haute couture, the jeans analogy doesn't exactly work, but for those of us who buy clothes to cover ourselves, well, you get the picture.

[Artesia]

Thing is, I wouldn't use it anyway because I wouldn't trust it to do the job. I mean, MS providing security? Hello? And I certainly wouldn't trust it to protect my computer against Microsoft.

[smolloy]

Thing is, I wouldn't use it anyway because I wouldn't trust it to do the job.

Actually, in some ways I'd *prefer* MS to be doing this. A week or two ago there was a situation where a big-name anti-virus program managed to break Windows by mistaking an important system file for a virus. I can't remember who it was, but it knocked a lot of windows users offline for a while. This is a standard problem with closed-source software (that you're not allowed to know the details of the system you're protecting), but it's not a problem that MS anti-virus software would suffer from.

And I certainly wouldn't trust it to protect my computer against Microsoft.

On this we agree It's not going to protect you from any privacy problems MS has.

I can't imagine that MS releasing its own free anti-virus software will persuade any Linux folks to jump back to Windows.....