Opinion: GoneCare

If you signed up for a year’s subscription after the end of June this year, or need to renew before June next year, what do you get for your dough?

The service is apparently going to continue as a free service from then, no doubt under a new name as well, and surely not under it’s current codename “Morro”.

Then again, maybe Bill Gates enjoyed his soiree with Jerry Seinfeld and wants to set the stage for endless “morro” puns.

After Redmond responds with answers to the money trail and what you get for your shortened subscription, the next question is of course why? Did they really not get any takers?

That’s hard to believe since every new PC with a copy of Windows installed has also been offering users a trial of OneCare, so surely they got some traction there, and the price wasn’t any worse than most of the other non-free anti-malware offerings.

Maybe Microsoft wants to put the competition to the sword with a free offering, and then make us pay later?

Well, they could have done that with their browser but it’s still free, so it would seem to be an odd strategy.

Perhaps the Microsoft support centres are totally swamped by calls from users whose PCs have died due to overzealous anti-everything software?

The most recent widely reported snafu was from AVG’s anti-virus software, which decided a genuine Windows file was a Trojan, but there have been others, and probably many more we’ll never hear about.

A common support centre strategy starts with “uninstall all anti-virus software” before trying to diagnose the fault.

Is that what prompted Microsoft’s move to market domination?

And let’s face it, AVG has done remarkably well in the freebie market so there should be no shortage of takers for whatever Microsoft “Morro”.

From Redmond’s perspective, and the users’, knowing that every PC has at least basic protection can’t be a bad thing. But they’ve gotta change that name. Surely.