An year ago we launched Microsoft Security Essentials. I remember the day as I was looking at the Twitter stream to see the overall reactions and they were simply great! Further on, when I travelled, the main complaint I heard in some countries was: “Why do we not have it?” and it is a fair question.
Now, one year is gone and where do we stand? I moved personally quite some PCs from different Anti-Malware vendors to Microsoft Security Essentials and do not say any reason anymore to pay for a solution. Most solutions (being red or yellow or any color) consume a lot of processing power to do things the OS or the applications you use already do like firewalls, spam filtering etc. I have seen it too often that this simply slowed the PC down and the user then decided to switch part of their protection off… not really the goal of the exercise.
Typically I tell users to do three things when they run a Windows PC (and it is no different at all on any other platform):
What more do you need?
Now to the learning: Our Microsoft Malware Protection Center published some statistics here: One Year of Microsoft Security Essentials.
So far we run on 31 million PCs! The interesting figure was the 27 million of those reported infections! So either they did not run anti-malware before or they did not renew their subscription beforehand. This is a real step forward to protect the ecosystem!
Look at the distribution outside the US:
Brazil did an outstanding job and so did Italy and especially the Netherlands if you compare the market size! I guess the other big ones like Germany, France, UK, China have room for improvement. Part of the problem here is that Microsoft Security Essentials needs a genuine copy of Windows as there is no real value in protecting something where malware came pre-installed and well-hidden in the stolen copy of the software.
Let’s work together to protect our users and let the install-base grow!
Roger