Microsoft made a big splash when they introduced their OneCare product. It was supposed to be the answer to the other major players in the desktop anti-malware arena. It just really never took off. Microsoft tried pretty hard, including giving away a free copy of Office 2007 – one of their most profitable product – as part of the subscription for a while.
It seems that Microsoft has finally decided to throw in the towel on the OneCare experiment. Or they’re upgrading and rebranding, depending on which talking head you want to believe. The facts are that OneCare is being pulled from sales channels at the end of June 2009 and replaced with “Morro” a free offering from Redmond.
The new offering is supposed to run more efficiently and provide comparable virus protection, but will be removing the backup and management tools from the offering. I’m not so sure that it is much of a stretch for most folks to have assumed that software with less functionality would be more efficient, so that doesn’t really seem to be a huge selling point of the new software to me.
Of course, now that it will be free rather than a subscription priced product there is a real chance that the fears of 2006 will be realized, with Microsoft’s marketing muscle helping it to displace the established anti-virus players in the market. They couldn’t before because the product wasn’t really any less expensive than competitors and certainly wasn’t any better than them either. Some number of folks is going to care more about cost than quality and that will help drive adoption of Morro.
I’ll wait to see the new Morro product before passing judgment one way or another, but look for a lot of noise about this from Microsoft next year when they make the switch. It might be a great way to save a good chunk of change and also restore some of the performance that the security suites have sucked out of your computers.
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