I made a mistake last weekend. Not your typical alcohol-induced mistake …. I downloaded a piece of software I shouldn’t have (more on that in a minute). You see, having just done major info-surfing, I had anti-virus on the brain. And according to Forrester Research, the same goes for most IT managers these days.
Now, about my mistake: Microsoft is gearing up for its push into the enterprise and consumer desktop protection market, so I decided to try the Windows OneCare Live beta (ideas.live.com). After uninstalling my previous anti-virus software I downloaded OneCare Live, followed the instructions, rebooted, and — ta-da — my machine froze for the next several hours on the “Windows is Starting Up” screen, even after several hard resets.
Mad at myself for having tried to fix something that wasn’t broken, I chose the nuclear option: Reformatting my PC – and logging an email based error report.
A follow-up e-mail told me I was in a “very small minority of people” out of the hundreds of thousands who’ve tried the beta. Probably the CA hadn’t completely uninstalled. Right …. Whatever.
What I learned is that the Web has changed my concept of “beta,” but not apparently Microsoft’s. Where I once thought of betas as potentially lethal, I now see them more as a feature preview, like Yahoo Maps or Google Earth — might not be great but they won’t take out my machine. So the question for Microsoft is, Do you stick with the old “potentially lethal” concept, or raise the bar? I know software development is complicated, but there are a lot of good anti-virus choices out there, folks ….
Filed under: Technology
