14 DAY TRIAL // Security outfit Avast is downplaying the relevance of Microsoft Security Essentials on the antivirus market. In a recent interview with Softpedia, Vincent Steckler, CEO of AVAST Software, revealed that the free security solution from Microsoft, formerly codenamed Morro, isn’t exactly stealing AVAST users away.
“We haven't seen any impact whatsoever,” Steckler told us. “We survey users who remove our product and ask them what product they're going to move to next and MSE is in the low single digits. Maybe 2% or 3% of the users who remove our product say that they're going to MSE. It's the same as BitDefender, for example.”
The Redmond company hasn’t shared any data to paint a comprehensive picture of the adoption level of Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0 since the AV product was introduced in late 2009. However, the software giant did point out at just a few weeks after MSE 1.0 was released to web, that over 1.5 million users had already downloaded the new free security solution.
In addition, Steckler revealed that he believes MSE was made available to serve additional purposes besides simply protecting users of genuine Windows operating systems which don’t bother to buy an AV solution.
“Data collection for Forefront has always been our suspicion. Microsoft's official reason was, I think, that they thought most users were unprotected. We obviously don't agree with that, but consumer traffic is fantastic for data collection, because consumer traffic is so much dirtier than corporate traffic,” he said.
“Number one, there's a lot of rules at the workplace, but number two, there's a lot of other layers of protection. I think if you want to have a good corporate product, getting access to a lot of consumer traffic is very important, so, I always thought MSE was their way of collecting data for Forefront. But, there's nothing wrong with that,” Steckler added.
Microsoft Security Essentials does in fact share code with Forefront, the company’s security offering designed for business users. But of course, Microsoft entered the security market long before MSE. Microsoft Security Essentials was released as a replacement for Windows Live OneCare, a paid AV from the Redmond company which has been shelved. And fact is that all security outfits perform data collection, which helps them increase the quality of their products, overall, but also detection-wise.
Steckler did point out that there’s one aspect of MSE he’s not all that happy with. “Remember, with MSE, the user can not opt out of having their data sent to Microsoft. If they want to use MSE, they have to agree for their data to be sent to Microsoft, which we think is a little unfriendly,” he said.
Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 is currently being built in Redmond, and the company is allowing early adopters to test drive the Beta release. Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from Microsoft Connect.
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