Thursday, November 09, 2006

Best. Analogy. Ever.

Some of the magazines I get (and I get bunches) are expensive, some are free, some of those are occasionally worth the read. But rarely is the editorial of any of them worth the soy it's printed with. Imagine my surprise when I found this editorial in the November, 2006 issue of Windows IT Pro:

You buy a house. After you move in, your walls and floors are suddenly soaking wet because all the pipes are leaking. You learn that your builder is infamous for constructing popular houses that have porous plumbing. Then you find some plumbing companies that specialize in fixing your builder's pipes. These plumbers have become hugely successful by understanding how to cut holes in your walls, access the pipes, fix them in whatever way they feel is appropriate, then charge you for getting rid of the leaks your builder was responsible for. The plumbers might have knocked holes in your walls, but at least you're no longer drowning.

Naturally, you join your neighbors in demanding that your builder stop constructing houses with dangerous plumbing. After years of complaints, the builder finally sees the light and revamps the whole plumbing system. The builder also realizes that when plumbers need to work on the pipes (as they inevitably must), whacking holes in random walls isn't the best approach and burglars could also use those holes to plunder the house. So the builder decides to create access panels through which plumbers can reach the pipes but that shut burglars out.

Everybody lives happily ever after, right? Not really. Plumbers are outraged: Not only has the builder eliminated a huge plumbing market by constructing houses with better pipes, but the builder is also preventing the plumbers from taking the quickest, easiest route to reaching the pipes. No more knocking holes in walls. How dare the builder improve its product in ways that prevent other businesses from profiting from the product's defects?

Karen Forster, be proud! You've captured completely the attitudes of McAfee and Symantec to the Kernel Patch Protection built into Vista x64. Personally, I'm happy to see both of those cruft-ware companies experience as much pain as possible, given the number of PC's I've had to clean up (and how difficult that is) after one of thier suites has inserted tenticles into every nook and cranny of some machine (now no longer functional). I'm still mad about the way McAfee broke pages with largish-viewstate, and the way that went unfixed for literally years.

If you want to know who will play along, Trend-Micro is happy to use Microsoft's new APIs, and I'm a customer because of that respect.

2 comments:

Tom Leith said...

Marc --

I'm about to dump Symantec (finally) myself, but I'm wondering: how good is Microsoft's Live OneCare product compared to the older (notice I didn't say "more mature") products??

Decent choice?

t

IDisposable said...

Live One Care seems to be fine for a desktop/laptop...

I also like using AntiVir as a free scanner, it's what I put on machines that I have to clean up for family and friends.