
Microsoft Recommends You Use a Third-Party Antivirus - sheldor
http://www.howtogeek.com/173291/goodbye-microsoft-security-essentials-microsoft-now-recommends-you-use-a-third-party-antivirus/
======
smacktoward
In their defense, Microsoft has a tough line to walk here.

On the one hand, they have a responsibility to protect their users from risks
that inhere from using their operating system. And we know from long
experience that most users won't go looking for external products for needs
like this, and most of those that will can easily end up with sub-par products
because they're not sophisticated enough to judge what makes one antivirus
program superior to another. So the only true way to meet that responsibility
is to provide a strong antivirus solution with Windows out of the box, or as
close to "out of the box" as it can get (say, via Windows Update or the
Microsoft app store).

On the other hand, there is a large community of third parties who have built
thriving businesses on providing antivirus support for Windows users. If
Microsoft's antivirus is _too_ good, it would put all these third parties out
of business -- why would anyone buy external antivirus products if Windows is
already bulletproof?

And while Microsoft would protest that it's only trying to look out for users,
its words would be undermined by its own past actions. Microsoft has a long
history of killing companies in the Windows ecosystem and seizing their
profits for themselves by bundling a competing product with Windows itself.
This play was used to kill Netscape and Stac Electronics (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_lawsuit)),
among many others. So third parties could be forgiven for worrying that such a
move by Microsoft would just mean Redmond was coming for them.

Moreover, those bundling tactics were a key part of why Microsoft came under
antitrust scrutiny in the 1990s. That scrutiny did major damage to Microsoft's
brand reputation and contributed to the 2000s becoming their "lost decade" as
they struggled to retool their way of doing business rather than pushing
forward advances in their products. If they really did put their third-party
security ecosystem out of business, it would risk renewing that scrutiny and
starting that whole difficult cycle all over again.

So while it's certainly not ideal from the perspective of Windows users, from
Microsoft's perspective, the position outlined in the article -- that MS's
antivirus product will only ever be a minimal sort of protection that doesn't
overshadow the third-party options -- is probably the only position they think
they can reasonably take.

Which sucks, but what can you do? Years of gluttony lead inevitably to years
of pain.

------
lewispollard
Couldn't this just be safeguarding against more EU court cases re:
monopoly/competition/etc when bundling software that has third party
competitors?

