News Kaspersky attacks Microsoft over alleged Defender monopoly

I get what they're saying, that by only allowing developers 6 calendar days instead of what used to be 2 months and then disabling their product if the developer doesn't fix any problems in those 6 days, however can a case be made, in today's market, that Microsoft are still dominant?

For me that's the more interesting thing, will the FAS and/or EU rule that Microsoft is still dominant despite the increase in tablet and smartphone OS's.

 

The argument would go that Tablets and Phones are entirely separate markets and shouldn't be counted. In the world of PCs Microsoft is very much still dominant over Apple and Linux, even if that market has shrunk somewhat in the last ten years.

 

Yea i personally agree with both of you, however i get the feeling Microsoft don't
Especially with Windows 10 supposedly being targeted at mobile and tablets.

 

I have never been a fan of Microsoft's browsers and I do think they are definitely using their formerly monopolistic position to push competition out of the markets they feel worth attacking. But even though I have to agree that they seem to be at it again with Windows 10 and Defender, maybe, just maybe, this time their product is just good and might rightfully replace the bloated competitors.

Then again, the law is the law and even giants have to follow it. I just had to think of the old sayings about the pot calling the kettle black or people living in glass houses...

 

I gave up on active AV. Although I use the Microsoft thing because it turned itself on when I removed AVG. But if it didn't do that I would run nothing. Now I keep an eye on network traffic and run Malware Bytes every now and then.

 

Microsoft can't catch a break, can they?

I can understand the Internet Explorer thing (used to drive me up the wall that Windows Update would only work on IE) but consumers were bitching about lack of AV in Windows for years.

Microsoft, in a rare moment, appeared to listen. Sure, MSSE has slipped - not quite sure why; it used to actually be half-decent, and certainly have less system impact than any of the other options other than ClamAV. I hate the tweaks they made in the Anniversary Update of Win 10, as you now can't close the Defender window any more without canceling an active scan.

I ran Kaspersky on three systems and MSSE on another two. I'd boot up the non-Kaspersky boxes using the Kaspersky live DVD every so often to do a full scan - never found anything. But the Kaspersky application I've grown steadily more irritated with. It won't auto-update if I've not been online for more than 24 hours, it's slow as hell to load on my ultrabook (but fast to scan)... whinges constantly about disabled plugins in Firefox - SafeMoney drives me up the %^&*ing wall as it seems to break - without fail - almost every online store I go on when I try to check out.

When you have to disable your antivirus to get Verified by VISA to work... there's something wrong with the AV. The same thing happens for family members using Kaspersky, which given that several of them can't cope when their computers do something unexpected, is the icing on an already bitter cake.

...

When will it end? Will the Notepad++/Sublime Text devs sue to get MS to remove Notepad as it's 'anticompetitive'? Or VLC, Foobar2k or Kodi sue to get Windows Media Player removed?

I wouldn't mind so much, but take this to its logical conclusion and you have an OS where you order 'a la carte' when you buy and it builds a custom ISO for you? Yes, I want DirectX, no, I don't want Notepad, I want Notepad++, no, I don't want WMP, I want VLC/Foobar... (that might be a good thing for some, but would be confusing as hell for non-techies...)

edit:

Kaspersky needs to get their own house in order before throwing their toys out of the pram. It's funny, because I moved to Kaspersky due to recommendations from a colleague I trust saying it was fantastic... but frankly, some of its behaviour is more akin to malware than anything else. Why do AV solutions always seem to go that way?

Also, the last system I had to heavily disinfect (another colleagues laptop) had Kaspersky on it. Whatever had got on first it hadn't spotted, and said virus then proceeded to bring Kaspersky in particular and the system in general to its knees. So no AV is bulletproof, or should be treated as such (as most of us know).

 

Microsoft could just give away the basic os, only thing it can do out of the box is run windows store, notepad, wmp and so on have to be installed as uwp through it.

Three years later: Oh you want to uninstall a gpu driver? Thats an annual $485 licence fee with auto renew enabled by default to Microsoft for the Calculator, MS Office, Unistaller Bundle

 

Yup.

Given that MS was giving Windows 10 away, it wouldn't hurt them to make a linux version of Office. I mean, please, Microsoft? If you're going the SaaS (Software as a Service) route, it's not like you'd be losing money...! RedHat have shown you can make a lot of money that way - selling support for free software. That said, when I had to contact Red Hat via work, they actually knew what they were talking about. The last time I tried Microsoft support... they were struggling to even understand the problem I was experiencing.

 

I've been a Kaspersky user for a long time and it was a small program back then until it grew and grew.

I had the Kaspersky internet package until I abandoned it to NOD32 and Windows firewall. The Windows firewall is good enough and I find the internet package to be an extra waste of money. There's no need for additional tools when we have them already and they work just as well.

 

I get Kaspersky through being a Barclays online banking user, find it really handy. I agree that SafeMoney is trash though and does break the Visa verification process, scared me a few times that, so I switched it off. Other than that, I like Kaspersky. Crucially it did a great job of eradicating one of those annoying browser hijack extensions. Accidentally added it, did a full scan and it removed every single file associated with it, gone straight after. Usually it's a matter of targeting the damn thing with Malwarebytes etc. and deleting all the files manually, so I was rather pleased with that result.

Performance feels fine as everything I store is on either PCIe storage or is a SATA 3 SSD, CPU is fast enough that it doesn't really cause me headaches.

 

It's not really about Microsoft including things like notepad, mediaplayer, defender, etc, etc.

The anti-competitiveness Kaspersky highlighted is how Microsoft have reduced the time (from 2 months to 6 working days) developers have to ensure their software is compatible, and how if Microsoft deem it not compatible they disable the developers software and replace it with their in house solution.

Also Microsoft seem to relegate license renewal notification of third-party software to the action center where it's claimed users can easily miss a license renewal notification and once the third-party software is swapped for Microsoft's in house solution there's no notification that the third-party has released an updated version.

 

Thanks, I did not know that. When I was working as a system engineer back in 2010/2011 we replaced McAfee's atrocious suite with Microsoft's solution and never looked back. It was good, it was cheap, it was unobtrusive.

I have no recent experiences with commercial AV software, mind you. We are using Kaspersky at work, but I'm not in IT anymore so I have no inside into metrics and the overall user experience with our laptops is utterly disgusting. I just wouldn't be able to pin it on any one software. At home I haven't had any issues with malware or viruses for as long as I care to remember. Be that because I know what I'm doing or because MSE is doing what it's supposed to do, I don't really care either way.

 

NOD32 will be my next AV to try, when I finally get sick of Kaspersky permanently.

I quite like Kaspersky as an AV. It's all the "value added" stuff that I don't want that drives me up the wall. It's marginally easier than Symantec or McAfee to remove, but it still gets its claws in pretty tight.

I can deal with having to work around SafeMoney breaking VbVISA... but some family members can't, and it's not always easy to explain how to fix something when they're totally freaking out down the 'phone.

Yep, I remember it. Personally, I'd have been tempted to say, "If reduced media edition" isn't good enough, how about "we only made this cut down version because a judge decided you needed more difficulty in your life edition".

Hm, good points.

Not sure.

I do know Kaspersky never shuts up though in the Action Centre. I update the thing, Kaspersky tells me "all up to date!" and then throws up an Action Centre notification of "Your Kaspersky Internet Security is out of date and cannot be updated!" (because I've not been online for 12 hours...)... is that Windows making Kaspersky look stupid, or Kaspersky making Kaspersky look stupid?

Although, frankly, software that integrates that deeply into the OS (in the way AV programs etc do) really should get everything sorted ASAP - it'd be a bit like having drivers not turn up for your sound or graphics card for six months when a new Windows is released...

 

Yeah, that is one of some aspects with Kaspersky. I remember the faff with installing Kaspersky and it would stop installing if it detected trace amount left over from a previous different vendor (already uninstalled) and then having to go and get the cleanup tool from that vendor for removing minute traces and then can install. On one person's computer it stopped installing because it detected McAfee Siteadvisor which is not even an AV.

I do have a soft spot for Kaspersky but the impact on my Windows and browsing made me gave up and went for NOD32 - made a massive difference, the occasional popup is the only noticeable thing that NOD32 is there.