Microsoft's Free Antivirus: Is This An Apology?

Who should know more about PC threats than the company whose software makes most of them possible? Is Microsoft's upcoming, free anti-malware app the company's way of apologizing to customers?

Not hardly. The free service, codenamed "Morro" and due in beta "soon," appears only after years of Microsoft trying and failing to sell a protection product called "OneCare," which routinely landed low in the protection ratings.

As I said, you'd think Microsoft would know more about solving its own security problems than anyone, but if that were really true, we'd face fewer problems in the first place, right?

Microsoft also badly needs to do something to add zing to the Windows 7 release. That's zing, not Bing, which will, presumably, already be in Windows 7. Maybe Morro is supposed to be the feature people will upgrade to get.

There are times when even "free" isn't worth the price, and Morro may be one of them. Granted, it's not even in beta yet, but Morro will have to do much better than Microsoft's previous efforts to be worth anyone's time.

Morro's real-time anti-malware service, which will route all the URLs you want to visit by Microsoft first for a check against known malware sites, ought to be a winner. As quickly as Microsoft finds out about a malware location, it would immediately protect Morro users from it.

Of course, this requires that the Morro servers not slow down the user's browser performance and raises privacy concerns. What will Microsoft do with all your browsing data? Nothing too bad, I suspect, but it's always worth wondering and asking.

We also don't know whether Morro will always be free and what operating systems it will support. If it's Windows 7-only and turns out to be good, Microsoft will have missed a golden opportunity to build goodwill. If it turns out to be OneCare Part II, XP users will be glad we couldn't download it by mistake.

That puts Morro firmly onto my "wait-and-see" product list.

You may also be wondering what impact Morrot will have on the entrenched anti-badstuff companies, such as McAfee and Symantec. Probably zero, at least in the near-term. Theoretically, a really great Morro, available for all Microsoft desktop operating systems could kick the legs from under consumer protection software.

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