Dan Gillmor has opened up the Bayosphere, which hints at his citizen journalism initiatives that he left the San Jose Mercury News to work on.
But, today, he took a shot at Microsoft that I thought was unfair. Here, I’ll wait while you go and check out his post.
“I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows:
In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created.”
Dan, we’ve done a TON of security work and distributed that to our customers for free (one of the largest operating system updates in our history, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was given away free). We’ve given away a beta of our AntiSpyware program for months now (after spending lots of money to buy the company that made it).
We’re planning on making IE 7 freely available, which will have a ton of security work done on it.
It’s ironic, too, but I seem to remember you saying back when you worked at the Mercury News that one part of being a responsible large company is not tying products into Windows that would destroy competition in the marketplace. Dan, what would happen to all the anti-virus companies if Microsoft bundled in its own anti-virus software? Is that what you’re now asking us to do?
But, I’m trying to get an interview setup with the OneCare team to get their side of the story.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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