Consumers confused about Vista security

Stan Beer
Thursday, 12 October 2006 18:39

Opinion and Analysis

On the one hand we have the world’s largest software company entering the security space and promising us a more secure operating system called Windows Vista. On the other hand, we have the world’s two leading security companies saying that Vista will be less secure because of its maker’s new policies. Who do we believe?

There is no question that both sides of this argument are being waged to bolster their own vested interests. The answer essentially can be reduced to which is the lesser of two evils.

Microsoft for some time has been touting the enhanced security features of Vista. More recently, the software company, mindful of its increasingly limited growth options, launched itself into the security software market, in direct competition to its former partners Symantec and McAfee.

The two leading security companies were understandably nervous about competing with a company that owns the operating system they previously made a handsome living out of securing.

The concerns of Symantec and McAfee became more intense when Microsoft made it as plain as day that it fully intended to put them out of business by leveraging its ownership of the operating system and the desktop.

Firstly, Microsoft intends to make its own security center dashboard the default security monitoring interface on the Vista desktop. Since it is built into the operating system, it can’t be easily disabled. Therefore Symantec or McAfee would have to run their dashboards side by side with the Microsoft product.