{"id":90,"date":"2006-08-16T16:15:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-16T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idespisemicrosoft.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2026-01-28T18:34:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T00:34:42","slug":"the-insidious-silent-coup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/?p=90","title":{"rendered":"The Insidious Silent Coup"},"content":{"rendered":"
According to a recent CNet article<\/a>, Windows Live One Care is selling like hot cakes at the stores.<\/p>\n

\u201cHelped by low pricing, Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare landed the No. 2 spot in sales at American stores in its debut month, according to The NPD Group.\u201d<\/p>\n

And today, I saw this article <\/a>on eWeek \u2013 basically stating that Microsoft will \u201cbake\u201d the Live services into Vista – including of course Windows Live One Care. What I like to call the subscription based protection racket. The implications are obvious. Gramma gets her PC from Best Buy with the shiny new Vista OS and next thing you know a Pop-Up informs her that she needs to fork over $50 on her credit card to Microsoft because her antivirus\/spyware subscription ran out. It\u2019s one thing to get this annoyance from Norton or McAfee. It is another thing altogether to get this from a company that is responsible for making that buggy insecure OS that allows all the malware to exist in the first place. Sleazy doesn\u2019t even begin to describe this behavior. And I am sure the shills have plenty of excuses, such as not being able to give away this protection for free due to anti-trust regs. Or that Grandma doesn’t HAVE to get protection from Windows Live One Care – she can get it from anyone. Yeah Right. Think about it \u2013 for Windows One care to be successful, the OS has to continue to be insecure. Ever wonder why McAfee or Symantec products for OSX don\u2019t do so well? Or that if Microsoft is in competition with Symantec and Kaspersky, what obliges them to release virus signatures or exploit avenues to their competitors? <\/div>\n

I have said this before<\/a>, but if anyone else, say a car manufacturer had tried anything like this they would be sued out of existence or possibly spend time in jail. There would be outrage, congressional hearings, you name it! Imagine Toyota charging you an annual subscription to maintain fire extinguishers in your Camry because their defective engine keeps catching on fire. But Microsoft can get away with murder and people will keep handing over their hard earned money to this disgusting despicable monopoly.<\/p>\n

For people like yours truly that watched in disgust as Microsoft destroyed entire industries over the past two decades through abuse of its desktop monopoly, this is deja vu all over again. It is downright sickening. <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent CNet article, Windows Live One Care is selling like hot cakes at the stores. \u201cHelped by low pricing, Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare landed the No. 2 spot in sales at American stores in its debut month, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idespisemicrosoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}