Microsoft's torrent of bits in a week of announcements

24 June 2005 20:44 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

It's been another big week for Microsoft, although now we're at the end of it, you'd have been forgiven for thinking the Redmond giant had plans to annoy as many users as possible.

Firstly there was the reaction to the Javascript spoofing flaw - and Microsoft declined to fix it, explaining why in its advisory. By deciding this was a bugbear and not a particularly big or dangerous flaw, the company is basically sitting around, waiting for someone to properly exploit the bug. Opera claims you can find out the origin of the malicious dialog box even if it doesn't fully pass the Secunia test at the moment, but you can be sure rival browsers will get fixed - by which time MS will think about it.

Next, Microsoft's acquisition of New York based enterprise-level antivirus and general computer security company Sybari, first announced back in February when Microsoft decided to get into the antivirus market, was totally signed and sealed three days ago - but with the formalising of the deal came the news that the company was waving goodbye to new open source sales- though MS said it will support existing buyers (insert your own joke here).

Now that Sybari will only supply its antivirus, content filtering and anti-spam strength to Microsoft products from now on, you never know, the market leaders Symantec and McAfee, rattled by Microsoft's intrusion into their space, may decide to push some well known products onto Unix and Linux if they're forward-looking enough to look for new revenue streams. At a time when no-one can afford to be complacent because of several European companies happy to provide antivirus software for nothing as a hook to win new business, the two market leaders need to slim the bloatware and go looking for new markets.

Last but not least, in the absence of working code, the firm attempted to win support for its intent to create its own version of the wild west-style peer-to-peer downloading service, Bittorrent. With the brand name Avalanche, MS intends to include Digital Rights Management into the service and expect people to pay for the privilege of downloading but sharing bandwidth at the same time. The idea was rubbished by users and the inventor of Bittorrent alike, but as shown with the Xbox, Microsoft have patience and deep pockets, so expect to hear more about this service when it's actually demonstrably working - however long that takes.

Full tags

Software, Online, Browsers, Microsoft