Microsoft Live OneCare to go Gold

As many will already know MS has decided to take Live OneCare Beta commercial.
According to extracts from the MS announcement:

"Windows Live OneCare Subscription: comprehensive PC care service.
Starting in April, Windows Live OneCare beta users will have the first chance to purchase the full year’s subscription at a greatly reduced price. Please take note of two very important details:
If you want to purchase a subscription, you’ll need to uninstall your "private" beta client and install OneCare again from the public beta site: www.windowsliveonecare.com. After you've installed the public beta, you'll see a Purchase Now button on the Windows Live OneCare client, and you can click it to purchase your subscription.
The special discounted price of $19.95 will only be available from April 1st through April 30th, 2006. The price will go up to the MSRP of $49.95 starting in May. (I hope those outside the US will forgive me. I think this applies only to the US.)

Antispyware
Windows Live OneCare now offers added protection against spyware with the Windows Defender antispyware technology. This is just one of many enhancements and features we’ll add in the months to come. If you haven't done so already, try it out and send us your feedback via the Submit a Bug tool at beta.microsoft.com or the Windows Live OneCare Forum. "

I, personally, saw no need for OneCare since I have other firewall and antivirus apps and thought I would wait for OneCare to show a track record, since you cannot run OneCare and other similar apps at the same time.
I do have the antispyware Windows Defender (Beta). It is not entirely clear if that will also disappear at the end of April. In the past, it (and its predecessor, MS AntiSpyware) was not part of Live OneCare.

 

Interesting. Sunbelt's CounterSpy is $19.95 and superior, in my opinion, to the MS app. I certainly would not be lining the pockets of MS anymore than absolutely necessary .. and this is NOT necessary. Now granted... you're receiving a firewall and an antivirus (both of which are available for free anyway).

 

The other issue is one of speed - how fast can MS respond in the way of updates to virus/spyware/trojan sigs compared to the current industry?

For AV's for example, the leader is KAV with multiple updates per day, down to the slowest - AVG.

IMO, MS as of yet not learned how to do that.

Regards - Charles