Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft is now paralleling the competition by taking the trial preload route for selling the Windows Live OneCare PC security package.

To address the growing security and management needs of today’s new PC user, Microsoft Corp. is working with 11 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including Sony Corporation of America and Toshiba Asia Pacific to preinstall trial subscriptions of Windows Live OneCare on select new PCs across North America, Europe and Asia. Windows Live OneCare provides all-in-one security and anti-malware protection for consumers and small businesses along with tools that automate and simplify PC management and performance.

OneCare’s big selling point has been its low selling price, but while that may be good for retail box sales, getting to the new PC buyer’s wallet first probably has a greater effect. The other 9 OEMs besides Sony and Toshiba are small and primarily outside the USA.

Last week Ina Fried broke a story at CNET about a Microsoft effort to buff up Windows Vista’s image by filming Windows XP users with a bad opinion of Vista raving about a new version of Windows called "Mojave" after they were shown a demo.  The trick was that Mojave was actually Vista and the test subjects were suitably gobsmacked when they found out. Microsoft apparently liked the reactions so much that they are now on the Web at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.

While the idea is modestly entertaining, I’m puzzled about the utility of it beyond demonstrating that the average consumer is easily deceived by both the "madness of crowds" and a slick demo that I’m sure lacked Vista’s more tedious annoyances. More to the point, consumers don’t really have any choice but Vista and it hasn’t seemed to slow Windows PC buying except for a relative few who have newly given Apple a try.

Where Windows Vista has a real acceptance problem is with enterprises who for the most part do have a choice to stay with Windows XP and many are doing so based on their technical and financial evaluations. Mojave would hardly fare so well in a similar demonstration with enterprise CIOs and their technical staffs.

Linda Buquet at the 5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog notices a part of the Microsoft Financial Analyst Day presentations which reveals that the MSN browser toolbar about to be installed on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs will try to entice Google searchers over to Microsoft’s own Live Search cashback deals. From Satya Nadella’s portion of Steve Ballmer’s presentation:

So the last thing I wanted to show you is one of the challenges, of course, we have, given our share position, is how do we really get more people to know about Live Search and get the taste for some of the value, like, in particular, the cashback value? So the place where we are innovating is in the toolbar. We have recently done a distribution deal for our toolbar with Hewlett-Packard. So this is the toolbar that Hewlett-Packard will carry with some customizations of their own. It’s the MSN toolbar.

And so let’s say I’m on Google and I type in Xbox. I can go ahead and search for Xbox, and automatically the toolbar detects that you’re searching for Xbox on Google and a Gleam view that there is a cashback on Live Search. And so I can go ahead and at this point click on that Gleam and it’ll take you to Live Search, or it’s supposed to take you to Live Search. Oh, it is on Live Search. See, I didn’t even notice the transfer. So it’s so seamless that now you’re on Live Search. You can get the cashback for a particular Xbox that you want to buy. So that’s just an experiment on how we get the word out, get more users trying Live Search, and getting the value of things like Live Search cashback.

Buquet’s beef is that affiliate marketers who are advertising on Google and always trying to get their sites to rank higher in the search results are going to be cut out of their commissions if searchers buy via Live Search cashback. My concern is that this seems like the most annoying sort of crapware bloat with privacy concerns to boot.

Admittedly, a “gleam” (which is a lit up marker on the toolbar) is probably the least offensive way to do this (compared to pop-ups, say), but it is yet one more piece of dancing baloney that slows down the browser. As for Microsoft getting a complete copy of your Google searching history (and what else?), that ought to be grist for the privacy advocates’ mills. Yet another thing to uninstall if you buy an HP machine, I guess, and to be wary of installing otherwise.