This is very disturbing!
I switched to Microsoft's AntiSpyware after using several
other products that provided various degrees of
protection. I've felt that the AntiSpyware beta handles
alerts much more smoothly than other products. It often
seemed like I had to micro-manage other products because
they bugged me with too many decisions and yet didn't
advise me about the risk or didn't provide much
information about what app was doing what, etc.
I like the fact the AntiSpyware oftentimes gives a
recommendation that so far seems pretty good and so if I
need to examine an alert message I can pretty clickly
decide if I want to intervene and if not the popup goes
away.
As a developer I found other products required more micro
management for various features at times.
However, if I can't trust these recommendations because
Microsoft may potentionally mislead me in cases where its
to there benefit to let some questionable stuff slip buy,
then I can't realy on the programs recommendations. So
then it loses a lot of value because then I'm having to
micro-manage the alerts more. I'm not saying that
Microsoft definitely has questionable intent at this
point, but just the doubt makes the product lose value to
me. I'll feel the need to more carefully examine the
default recommendations with every popup because I'll be
wondering about bias (and if Microsoft continues down
that road, I'm sure the bias will increase).
I remember Gator. Although Claria Corp may be less
dispicable than Gator, just the fact that Microsoft is
having acquisition talks with Claria and downgraded
Claria's adware detection makes me seriously doubt my
continuing to use this product in the future, regardless
of Microsoft's real intent. If you don't do some serious
back-peddling on this, I going to drop AntiSpyware. From
this point on I'm always going to be wondering about the
objectivity of the product. Who else you might acquire
in the future that has adware connections, etc. And
that's a shame because I want a solution that I don't
have a doubts about the publisher's objectivity.
I'm sure some marketing people at Microsoft would like to
integrate Microsoft only adware into the core OS and sell
the anti-spyware product to block all non-Microsoft
adware.
