[This was written on June 17, 2004]

Don't buy Microsoft Antivirus (don't let them benefit from their own errors)

A few days ago, I bought a new computer for a friend of mine. He's a lawyer — little computer expertise, but he sits in front of a computer for hours, writing legal documents. The computer would of course run Windows XP and Office XP.

Yesterday said friend was outraged because his new Word would crash quite often (in his words, "Word closes and asks me if I want to send something to Microsoft — I don't want to send anything!") and he teased me and another friend who helped set up the damn computer that we just can't do our work right. We are both geeks that write code and set up computers for a living, so that was quite unlikely — and quite irritating, although understandable. He ended his remarks with something like "luckily, it will recover my documents after it breaks" which in his eyes was a wonderful achievement.

It took me a while to convince him that his computer is fine, that this is just a software problem nobody but Microsoft can fix and that we did, in fact, do a good job. However, his last remark struck me: storing your data somewhere safely and recovering it after a crash is indeed a nontrivial achievement. If Microsoft programmers could spend time and resources on such a feature and they got it right, how come they can't just keep Word from crashing so often? Fix the crashes in the first place, for god's sake! Don't just put bandages on them!

And today, Microsoft announces that they will enter the antivirus business. They will be kind to the other antivirus vendors (and to the antitrust guys) however: the antivirus will be sold separately, not bundled with the OS. I wonder if they couldn't just spend that money on improving Internet Explorer's and Outlook Express' security — or scrapping half of their "features" entirely for that matter, starting with HTML email, return receipts and any means to automatically execute any kind of file from within them. If you know it is executable and it comes from outside your computer, you don't want to execute it from within the web browser or the email client, period.

Next you know, Microsoft will create their own antitrust department...