MS Marches To Its Own Drummer

by Bob Seidel

If you want to understand human nature, you first have to realize that we all march to different drummers. As I spent my obligatory hours this week watching my car engine temperature go up while sitting in the 211 parking lot, I questioned which drummer the DOT was marching to. It's the third time I have seen the intersection of Long Beach Road (LBR) and 211 re-worked, and they still don't seem to have it right. They added a right turn lane to Lowes and Bank of America that wasn't needed, and they widened the curve from LBR turning right so that the big trucks wouldn't drag their tires into the mud. But nothing I saw that would actually improve the traffic flow like, oh, a double left turn lane into LBR.

I wondered what drummer the workers were marching to as they seemed to have difficulty controlling the traffic flow. And I wonder what drummer the DOT folks were marching to when they decided to do the work during the day instead of at night. Yes, the night temperatures were too cold to pave, but we waited years for that intersection to be re-built - we could have waited a few more months. But the beat goes on, and so will we.

Anyone who has been in the PC business, hardware or software, knows that dealing with Microsoft can be a strange and surreal experience. It is often not very obvious at all why they do something - the assumption is that it fits into some overarching strategic plan - but sometimes not in the best interest of the users.

A case in point just occurred, with little fanfare. The story concerns the Microsoft Anti-Spyware (MSAS) program.

As background, the anti-spyware programs grew up to fill a very important niche in PC system software. For some reason, the OS and anti-virus vendors just refused to recognize that there was a new class of nasty software (the generic term is now "malware") invading our PCs. It was left to relatively small, independent companies or individuals to write programs to fill the gap. Earliest and primary among these were Spybot and Adaware - both still free for personal use, and both excellent.

Finally, Microsoft decided to get into the act. Their first step was the purchase of an existing anti-spyware program from a company called Giant. MS did a quick paint-over of the Giant product, and released it in beta last year as MSAS. If you scratched the paint a bit, the Giant roots were evident.

But, it was pretty good stuff. Fairly easy to setup and use, didn't have too much impact on running programs when it was scanning, and very effective at finding and fixing spyware. Especially good was its ability to detect and remove the type of threats that attach to Internet Explorer. I started to roll it out into my client's PCs as the anti-spyware program of choice.

The MS rumor mill began to indicate that a name change was in the works - from MSAS to Microsoft Defender. But nobody expected the product itself to change. In my normal weekly software update, I downloaded and installed the latest Defender. To my surprise (and to that of many others, as evidenced by the MS newsgroup on the subject) it had changed completely - Defender is total re-write. But the biggest issue is that it has been sanitized - apparently Microsoft's direction was to make it so easy to use that it has almost no controls and give no feedback as to what it is doing. In fact, it doesn't even have an icon! It seems like this is a prelude to a built-in service in the upcoming Windows Vista.

But the worst problem is that the tools for cleaning out Internet Explorer problems are gone, and this is where the corporate direction strategy comes in. Microsoft has apparently moved that function to Internet Explorer itself. OK, that makes sense. But the only version of IE that has it is IE7, which is in early beta test, is not yet recommended for general use, and doesn't run on older versions of Windows.

So, for perhaps strategic reasons, MS has crippled a fine program. I have removed it from my system and gone back to the old standby Spybot. But the MS drummer marches on.

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)