Windows One Careless?

Tim reminded me about WindowsOneCare this week. I’d heard John Thompson, the CEO of Symantec, talking about Microsoft’s entry into the anti-virus market last week. I have a lot of time for John and I believe he’s put together an impressive strategy for Symantec over the last few years (I think the jury is still out over whether Veritas was a good decision, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt based on his track record and how little I know anyway). He was trying to move the debate away from plain and simple AV (which any number of people do now he said) to one about restoring consumer confidence in the Internet – he said people are more worried than ever now about identity theft, credit card fraud and so on. Symantec would be launching products in the spring to cover these markets. The entry of Microsoft in your space would make you move to a different market I’m sure. Still, as Marc Andreessen was quoted as saying, “everyone should compete head on with Microsoft at least once.”

Anyway, I checked out WindowsOneCare and having given my email address (After being assured I’d only receive “relevant updates”), this box popped up:

This was followed by a second certificate error and then by a notice that I shouldn’t be using Firefox anyway and that if I wanted to download the software I’d have to switch to IE. Hmmmmm.

Switching to the shiny, new IE7 I paste in the URL I’ve been told to resume from after the last message (interestingly the URL ends with the /purchase parameter, letting me know that Msft don’t plan to bundle this into the OS at this point) and then I’m told that I’m not part of the beta programme. So, back to the home page and then through the same path as I’d taken before – which kept me in the “public beta” pool. It’s busy downloading now. More anon.