Windows Live OneCare

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

~ the obituary ~

paid microsoft subscription antivirus was not a category turkish users bought in 2006. the home windows machines i was around ran cracked kaspersky or the free avast tier. onecare was a $50 per year microsoft product sold mostly through us best buy and circuit city, with retail boxes that did not really arrive in turkey at scale. it was the kind of product i read about on slashdot and moved past.

microsoft launched onecare on may 31 2006 as the first paid product in its consumer-security line. the antivirus engine traced back to the 2003 giant company software acquisition, which microsoft also folded into windows defender on the free side. onecare bundled the antivirus with a personal firewall. it added a windows pc backup utility on top. the whole thing was sold as a single subscription that covered up to three machines per household.

detection rate test results were the early problem. by 2007 av-comparatives ranked onecare last among 17 consumer antivirus products. virus bulletin noted that onecare missed 18.6% of the test set. microsoft posted improved scores by 2008 but never closed the gap with symantec norton or with the free competitors gaining share. on november 18 2008 microsoft announced morro, the free replacement that would ship the next year as microsoft security essentials. onecare subscriptions stopped renewing on june 30 2009.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

anyway, onecare was bill gates' answer to the security crisis windows had run into after blaster and sasser in 2003-04. microsoft had spent the late 90s avoiding the antivirus business, on the reasoning that windows should not need third-party protection. the worm era proved otherwise. gates ordered the trustworthy computing initiative in january 2002 and onecare was the consumer-facing fruit of that effort, after a long internal debate about whether microsoft should sell security separately or bake it into the os for free.

microsoft chose to sell it. the bet was that consumers would pay a small subscription for a brand-name microsoft product that integrated cleanly with windows update. for a few quarters that bet looked viable. dell shipped onecare preinstalled on home pcs. circuit city offered it at the register alongside hardware purchases.

~ what killed it ~

honestly, the detection rates killed it on the test labs side, while the free competitors killed it on the shelf. by 2008 avg free and avast had taken over the consumer windows antivirus install base in any country price-sensitive enough to consider a free product, which by then included most of europe and most of asia. norton and mcafee held the paid tier through oem bundling deals. microsoft sat in the middle of that sandwich with worse detection than norton and a price tag that the free alternatives did not have to match.

the strategic answer was to flip onecare into a free product and bundle it with windows, which is what microsoft announced on november 18 2008 when it disclosed morro. security essentials shipped in september 2009 as a free download (and as msrt-bundled later), with detection rates that climbed past onecare's. by 2012 it was the most-installed antivirus in the world, even though it never sat near the top of comparative tests.

~ what replaced it ~

anyway, security essentials evolved into windows defender, which microsoft folded into windows 8 in 2012 and then made the default on windows 10. the modern windows defender (rebranded microsoft defender in 2019) is the descendant of the onecare engine the giant company team built two decades ago. paid consumer antivirus survived as a category for a while longer through norton and mcafee, although the smaller players were finished. the lasting microsoft policy decision came out of the onecare era: protect windows for free, and recover the cost through the operating system license.

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