Spyware Warrior

[TeMerc]

By Ellen Messmer
Network World, 01/31/05

Consensus is building among industry watchers that Microsoft will have anti-spyware and anti-virus products on the market for businesses and consumers by year-end.

Many expect Bill Gates to detail such a product rollout during his keynote address at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco in two weeks. Microsoft declined to discuss that prospect last week.

However, with Microsoft's pending security splash regarded as a fait accompli, anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors are sizing up their chances of withstanding the Redmond giant. Business customers, stocked up on anti-virus but now eager to buy spyware protection, wonder if a Microsoft entry would drive down costs, or if Microsoft - whose software seems to always require patching - really can be counted on as the first responder in worm and virus outbreaks.

"This is a challenge for Microsoft: the inherent conflict of interest in that Microsoft has had to constantly struggle with this need to fix problems in their own products," says Neil MacDonald, a Gartner research analyst. For Microsoft to sell anti-virus and anti-spyware products is akin to "the water company, which has smelly water, selling filters to take the smell out," he says.

Last week the speculation that Gates will make security news at RSA had analysts - including at least one financial analyst, Adam Holt at J.P. Morgan, who predicts Microsoft will have an anti-virus product out in the third quarter - issuing alerts about the prospect.

MacDonald says Microsoft is in a hurry to get into the anti-virus/anti-spyware business if only to provide added protections for its Web browser, which is starting to lose market share to the open source Firefox browser. Firefox is said to have better security protections than Internet Explorer.

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