Microsoft Security Essentials

» see microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By 2009 the antivirus question on a Windows desktop had not changed in ten years. Something had to be installed. It wanted money once a year. The free options were mostly trial versions with a clock running in the corner, and the paid ones sold themselves by making the clock loud. Security Essentials showed up and simply refused to participate in any of that.

Microsoft announced it in November 2008 under the codename Morro and put version 1.0 out on 29 September 2009. It was free to anyone with a licensed copy of Windows. It had almost no interface, a single green square that told you whether you were fine, and it did not try to sell you a firewall or a registry cleaner on the way past. For a company with Microsoft's reputation at the time, shipping something this restrained was the surprising part.

People took it. It was past thirty million users within a year, and by March 2012 the market share trackers had it as the most installed antivirus product in North America and second in the world. Nothing about that was earned by being the best scanner. It was earned by being adequate and free at a moment when everything else was adequate and $39.95.

Where I was sitting, the free part mattered more than the scanning did. The antivirus market here ran on one year keys that a great many machines never bought twice, and on whatever the last person to touch the computer had left on it. Security Essentials was the first time the answer to "what should I put on this machine" was something you could just download without a conversation about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The distribution was the real weapon. Microsoft pushed it through Windows Update as an optional install, which meant it reached machines whose owners had never gone looking for security software and never would have. The rest of the industry noticed immediately and complained to regulators that the company was using the operating system to hand itself an audience, which was accurate, though the complaint sounded thinner every year that Windows got safer.

It also did something the paid products had stopped bothering with, which was to run on old hardware without slowing it to a crawl. A lot of the machines it protected were five years past their sell-by date and running Windows XP, and Microsoft kept supporting that combination until 2015, well after the operating system itself was finished.

~ the decline ~

The independent labs turned on it in 2012. AV-TEST had certified version 1.0 back in October 2009 and then withdrew certification in October 2012 when the product missed too many live samples. In June 2013 the same lab scored its protection at zero out of six, which is not a bad result so much as an absence of one, and the press coverage that followed was brutal.

Microsoft's answer was that Security Essentials was never meant to top the tables, that its job was baseline protection for machines that otherwise had none, and that the company measured itself on how many of its own customers got infected rather than on lab samples. It is a defensible position and it was also the sound of a product being demoted in public by the people who made it.

~ what it became ~

It never got a shutdown notice, because by then it had already been absorbed. Windows 8 shipped in 2012 with Windows Defender carrying the Security Essentials engine inside the operating system, so the standalone download stopped mattering for anyone on a current version. What was left was the Windows 7 build, kept alive for the enormous number of machines that never moved, until it reached end of service on 14 January 2020, the same day Windows 7 did. Definition updates carried on quietly for existing installations until 2023, which is a long tail for something that had officially stopped existing.

The joke that writes itself is that the idea won. Microsoft Defender spent the second half of the 2010s climbing back up the same AV-TEST charts that humiliated its ancestor, and by the end of the decade it was scoring at the top and shipping on every Windows machine at no cost. The free antivirus that everybody mocked for being mediocre did not lose. It stopped being a product and became a feature, which is the only reliable way for software to survive.

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