I’ve downloaded the beta of Microsoft’s anti-spyware and had a play with it. My initial reaction is favourable. It’s small, light and appears to work although the 3 ‘threats’ it found were only applicable to Internet Explorer. This made me sit up and take notice though, I’m a fairly scrupulous person when it comes to checking what I’m about to install on PC yet these malware products made it on to my hard drive. Being IE problems though they would never have affected me thanks to the wonder that is Firefox.
For the moment I will keep Spy Bot Search And Destroy, and it will probably remain my initial defence against these sort of nasties. I wonder what Microsoft will end up calling this program? After all, Microsot Windows AntiSpyware isn’t the sexiest of titles.
You bastard, I was writing up my assessment of it. Oh well, I’ll post it in a few days when I get it finished.
As for sexy names, I contend that Microsoft by-and-large *doesn’t* use sexy names. I reckon most of the time MS uses names that are simple to understand and convey that they are the last word in [whatever field]. Think Messenger; MediaPlayer; Internet Explorer; Windows; Word; Office. Yeah okay, exceptions might be Excel; Powerpoint; InfoPath. (Frontpage, Great Plains, Visio and others were bought from other companies.) But I wouldn’t be surprised if it stays as “Antispyware”.
My favourite current Microsoft name is OneNote.
Favourite past Microsoft name was ‘Liquid Motion’ – a Flash like animation language.