One of my myriad email newsletters had a link this week to this Techworld article, entitled: Microsoft admits OneCare flaws … which is basically an article about a couple of blog posts by the AntiMalware Team and the OneCare Team
Corporate communications on spaces.live.com? Really? My company has the whole domain blocked off as being a “Dating/Social” site and prevents access from within the corporate internet…. is that really where you want to make your official Mea Culpa statement? Of course, maybe that’s the point — not only is it on MSN spaces, it’s the first post on a blog that’s been dead since January … maybe they were hoping nobody would notice. And the other blog is even worse: it hasn’t been active since at least October of last year, and then suddenly, this Hello World post
Which begs the question: do news people really leave a blog in their RSS reader after 5 months of inactivity, or did someone at Microsoft email Gregg Keizer, Computerworld and ask him to have a look at their blog and write a story about it? What ever happened to Press Releases? I mean, I’m no “regular Joe user” but if you paid money for OneCare … is this how you expect them to issue apologies and promises to do better? It seems overly informal to me.
By the way, failing a VB100 really is par for the course. Just take these examples, out of 50 times the VB 100 has tested:
- McAffee has passed 29 of 48 attempts.
- Symantec has passed 36 of 42 attempts (and hasn’t failed since Sept 1999)
- CA eTrust has passed 29 of 40 attempts.
- BitDefender has passed 13 of only 19 attempts.
- Kapersky has passed 37 of 50 attempts (the only one here that’s never failed to enter).
- Nod32 has passed 42 of 45 attempts (which should give you some insight into why I use Nod32 — their last failure was over four years ago, and they’ve got the best record on the charts).
And some are even worse:
- Trend Micro has only passed 15 of 23 attempts (and they failed their most recent test in Dec 2006)
- Grisoft AVG has only passed 16 times out of 37 attempts (although they only have one failure (Oct 2005) in the last two years).
At this point in time, of course, Microsoft is 1 for 2, they’ve only been around for two tests, and they failed this most recent one (along with McAffee, GData, and Norman). Of course, Microsoft also came in at the bottom of the recent AV-Comparatives performance tests, so this is a second bad report, and a good reason why they’re in the news — we expect more from the world’s biggest software company.
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