February 15, 2005
New IE, free anti-spyware
Two of the pieces of news emerging from Bill Gates' keynote address at the RSA Conference this morning:
- Microsoft plans to offer a new version of Internet Explorer, IE 7.0, on its own, with a widespread beta version coming this summer. The company had been planning to wait until the next version of Windows, due in 2006, to come out with the new Web browser.
- The company will make the finished version of its anti-spyware product available to Windows users at no charge. That could complicate matters for existing vendors of anti-spyware software.
During his keynote address later in the morning, Symantec CEO John Thompson addressed Microsoft's broader security initiatives:
"We applaud Microsoft's security initiatives. They are very necessary -- but in my opinion, not sufficient for large enterprises. They don't offer a cross-enterprise, heterogeneous solution and genetically they may be incapable of doing so." As a result, he said, Symantec and other companies specializing in security software "will always be a better alternative. We provide common tools across the many disparate environments present in every large enterprise, and we aren't distracted by computer games and a host of unrelated security stuff going on."
Posted by Todd Bishop at February 15, 2005 01:27 PM
Given Symantec's lack of clear communication earlier this week/last week in their "own" Security issue this comment by Thompson is too funny.
The path to patching Symantec's own products was confusing.
Ask Thompson if they are going to do a better job in communicating when their own products have security issues?
Yes, how dare Symantec have "a" security issue. They should have several per week like Microsoft. Maybe they just aren't as used to vulnerabilities, so they're not as good at communicating them.
