Microsoft’s Allchin Misrepresented on Vista’s Need for AV

A controversy has developed over comments that were made by Jim Allchin, Microsoft Co-President of Platforms and Services, a couple days ago.

As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley writes:

I’ve always been one to question Microsoft’s motives and double-speak. But it is completely misleading to paint Allchin’s acknowledgement that his son — running a heavily locked-down, parental-control-ridden PC, in non-admin mode (one would pretty safely assume) — isn’t running a Microsoft- and/or third-party-developed AV program means Microsoft is claiming Vista is so solid that it doesn’t require AV software.

Did Allchin make a mistake in his attempt to prove that Vista is far more secure than any previous version of Windows, including XP SP2? Yes. He should not have suggested that any users, even those with Windows chiefs as their fathers, can or should forego antivirus software.

Foley is right to say that it is misleading to portray Allchin’s comments about his son’s AV-free Vista PC as suggesting that antivirus software isn’t required as an accompaniment for the new version of Windows.

However, I think she is wrong to say that Allchin was out of line in pressing the point that Vista is more secure than any previous version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. While some might say, with justification, that Vista didn’t have much of a hurdle to clear in surpassing the security capabilities of Windows XP, it isn’t necessarily wrong for Allchin to acknowledge the security advances Microsoft has made.

As for his alleged suggestion that a user can or should forego antivirus software on a Vista PC, I don’t think he’s guilty of the charge that’s been leveled at him. Let’s look at what Allchin is reported to have said, as reported by BetaNews:

"I would say that Windows XP SP2 did an amazing job, and I’m proud of what we did there. But you have to understand, we learned a lot during Windows XP SP2, and there were things that we couldn’t put in that product," explained Allchin.

"I’ll give you an example: It’s my favorite feature within Windows Vista, it’s called ASLR (Address Space [Layout] Randomization). What it does is, each Windows Vista machine is slightly different than every other Windows Vista machine. So even if there is a remote exploit on one machine, and a worm tries to jump from one machine to another, the probability of that actually succeeding is very small. And I wanted to do this in Windows XP SP2, but we couldn’t figure out how to do it. So then a smart guy here came up with a solution, so we put it in Windows Vista."

After summarizing that past statement, Allchin continued, "Please don’t misunderstand me: This is an escalating situation. The hackers are getting smarter, there’s more at stake, and so there’s just no way for us to say that some perfection has been achieved. But I can say, knowing what I know now, I feel very confident."

"I’ll give you an example: My son, seven years old, runs Windows Vista, and, honestly, he doesn’t have an antivirus system on his machine. His machine is locked down with parental controls, he can’t download things unless it’s to the places that I’ve said that he could do, and I’m feeling totally confident about that," he added. "That is quite a statement. I couldn’t say that in Windows XP SP2."

I don’t think Allchin is advising anybody to run a Windows Vista machine without antivirus software. In fact, he explicitly recognizes that hackers and other propagators of malware are constantly devising new exploits and threats. He returns to that theme later in the Beta News article:

But I need to say the following: Windows Vista is something that will have issues in security, because the bar is being raised over time," Allchin continued. "But in my opinion, it is the most secure system that’s available, and it’s certainly the most secure system that we’ve shipped. So I feel very confident that customers are far better off by using Windows Vista than they are with anything that we’ve released before."

The problem, in my opinion, was not in what Allchin said, but in the way in which his comments were misinterpreted and misrepresented by others.

Motorola’s Acquisition of Good Technology Might Trigger Nokia Move

In a move that caught its competitors and many market watchers off guard, Motorola announced today the acquisition of mobile-messaging software vendor Good Technology for an undisclosed sum.

Prior to the acquisition, Good and Motorola had worked together as technology partners. Good also had a technology partnership with Motorola rival Nokia.

Despite Nokia’s acquisition of Intellisync, which closed earlier this year, the company likely will feel compelled to answer Motorola’s acquisition with one of its own.

Among the candidates Nokia might consider are Visto, which has worked with the leading handset vendor to bring mobile email to Nokia’s mobile phones, and Seven Networks, which also has partnerships with Nokia and all the other major handset players. Neither Visto nor Seven would come at a cheap price, though much will depend on what Motorola actually paid for Good, which had attracted more than $200 million in funding since its inception.

To this point, Visto has gone through $267 million in funding during the past 10 years — including another round of $51 million announced in late September — but the company still isn’t profitable and is not likely to make a serious bid to go public until next year, if then. Visto has been litigiously aggressive, launching intellectual-property lawsuits against its major rivals.

Seven Networks reportedly has attracted more than $75 million in aggregate funding, which might give it more flexibility in negotiations with a potential acquirer.

Motorola’s acquisition of Good Technology also affects Research In Motion (RIM), though the Canadian purveyor of email devices and software is less exposed than Good’s software-only competitors because it generates so much of its revenue from sales of its handheld email devices.

Microsoft also might be affected by Motorola’s move, though my guess is that Microsoft will not have to acquire another vendor in the mobile space to address its strategic or tactical mobile-messaging requirements.

CIBC World Analyst Almost Gets It Right on Embattled Nortel

In a report published today by Canada’s The Globe and Mail daily newspaper, Allan Robinson notes that CIBC World Ittai Kidron, an analyst with CIBC World Markets Inc., takes a dim view of Nortel Networks.

Saying Nortel lags behind its competitors in many markets, Kidron calls Nortel a "turtle in a rabbit race." The analyst also said the company’s operational restructuring and product rationalization plans are taking longer than expected.

I have not been impressed by the recent pronouncements of Nortel’s senior executives, including the company’s CTO, John Roese, who doesn’t seem to have a coherent understanding of what the company ought to be doing to address the requirements of its existing and prospective customers.

Kidron seems to think Nortel can find success in two markets, Metro Ethernet and VoIP. Perhaps that is an accurate assessment, but I view Nortel as a serious threat only in Metro Ethernet. Even then, I think that business could do better in other managerial hands.

Over the long haul, I see Nortel losing ground in VoIP, especially in the enterprise IP PBX market, where it continues to struggle against Cisco and Avaya and might also be vulnerable to incursions by open-source Asterisk VoIP systems offered by vendors such as Digium and Fonality.

Notwithstanding its high-profile partnership with Microsoft relating to IP-based unified communications, Nortel looks set to lose its relevance in the enterprise. Even its relationship with Microsoft stands to deliver far more benefit to the Redmond software giant — which wants to feed off Nortel’s telephony expertise and credibility until it has the knowledge and perceived mandate to integrate VoIP functionality into Windows softphones — than is likely to accrue to Nortel.

If you want some insight into where Nortel might find itself in the future, look no further than the following excerpt of remarks that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made on July 18, when appearing with Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and others to announce the Microsoft-Nortel partnership.

Said Ballmer:

In my own view I kind of liken it in a sense to something very important that we were involved in now probably almost 20 years ago with Digital Equipment Corporation when we really aligned what we were doing in e-mail. We didn’t just interoperate, and four or five years later we had millions of seats of Exchange deployed, and frankly Digital had been the most important partner we had had to get there. And so I think the notion of aligning, having strong go-to-market and mutual product development will be mutually beneficial for us and for our joint customers.

Even though Ballmer implies that Microsoft’s email partnership with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was mutually beneficial, history suggests that Microsoft, with its market-dominating Exchange, benefited far more from the relationship than did DEC. If Ballmer is correct in drawing an analogy between the relationship Microsoft had with the DEC and the partnership it has formed with Nortel to bolster the IP-based telephony aspects of its unified-communications offering, then Nortel will serve as a convenient stepping stone for Microsoft, a partner from which Microsoft will learn and then leave behind.

So, what should Nortel do?

With the current executive leadership, the company seems capable of competing effectively only in the Metro Ethernet space. It is losing ground to major rivals in enterprise networking, losing ground in VoIP, losing ground in wireless — despite protestations that it will find renewal in WiMAX — losing ground in security (where it has become indifferent), and generally looking like a company whose better days are well behind it.

Maybe Nortel’s brightest future is in a piece-by-piece divestiture of the company. At a time when I believe Cisco is susceptible to market-share losses in enterprise networking, surely somebody could do a better job than the current Nortel management of making headway in that market with Nortel’s product portfolio. The same applies to Nortel’s VoIP and wireless products and technologies, as well as its MAN and optical-networking offerings.

We keep hearing promises about a turnaround, a reversal of fortune, at Nortel. Perhaps it’s time, though, to take a cold, hard look at what’s really happening. Nortel’s shareholders and customers deserve better than what the company’s nominal leadership has done and continues to do.

Corel Partners with Mozilla, but It Hardly Matters

Corel announced yesterday that Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser will be bundled with Corel’s WordPerfect Office X3-Home Edition 2007, which includes software for word processing, spreadsheets, CD/DVD burning, photo and video applications, and security. It is priced at US$79.

In incarnations and years past, Corel has taken repeated runs at the Microsoft Office juggernaut, all to little or no effect. I suspect Corel’s impact will be negligible again this time around, especially now that web-based applications are becoming richer and more compelling as low-end alternatives to personal-productivity application suites.