Microsoft cans OneCare – to offer free AV

November 19, 2008

This news I think is really interesting.  I said long ago that MSFT was going to have another attempt at anti-virus, and they would like to do it for free – it stood to reason to offer a product as they are trying to protect their users, their software, and there’s some additional revenue to be had there.  However, it doesn’t look to be that much revenue as the decision to can OneCare and to offer at least some of it for free is an interesting move.

There’s a lot of money in AV – Foundstone’s parent company, McAfee, does well from consumer AV.  With this move, there’s a lot at stake here.  I guess we are going to see a whole new round of anti-trust/monopoly suits, and also revenue model changes – there’s not much to argue about free.  I’ve seen the argument "why buy AV from a vendor that makes viruses possible", but it’s all about defense in depth (it’s never possible to catch absolutely everything).  I don’t think it’s going to change the corporate AV space that much as that’s more about management which (from what I see) MSFT’s solution doesn’t have (yet).  This may only be a matter of time though.

Running an AV product takes a lot of people/effort – you have to have a 24hr operation to identify new threats, reverse engineer them, and generate updates/signatures to end-users.  Doing all this "for free" (although there’s other benefits/revenue) is a good move and shows how committed to security MSFT are.  I haven’t seen any run-off’s between the AV solutions for a while as I don’t track that area any more, but from what I understand they are all pretty even, jockeying for position.

There’s additional well thought-out commentary from Rich Mogull and Ryan Naraine.

Posted in Industry