By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, June 1, 2006

After years of insisting that security and maintenance software was best left to other developers, Microsoft is moving to grab that business for itself.

Good.

Yesterday, Microsoft stepped on some of its most faithful third-party developers when it unveiled its new Windows Live OneCare service, a $49.95-a-year package of security and maintenance tools ( http://www.windowsonecare.com/ ) that provides most of the services that Microsoft's customers have traditionally bought from Symantec and McAfee.

This is no reflection of OneCare's merits compared with the likes of Symantec's Norton Internet Security and McAfee's Internet Security Suite. (Look for a full review of OneCare later this month.) Offering OneCare is just the right thing to do -- even for a company that's repeatedly lost court cases for bolting once-separate programs onto its operating system.

OneCare's components -- a new antivirus program, the Windows Defender anti-spyware software, a firewall application, a system tune-up utility and a backup program -- all address basic computer maintenance. If you don't perform those everyday housekeeping tasks, you will find your computing experience ever more unpleasant.

That sets OneCare apart from Microsoft's earlier adventures in adding software to Windows. Listening to music files, ordering prints of your photos and editing home movies are entertaining pastimes, but if you avoid them all, your computer will still work perfectly well. And yet those features came stitched into Windows XP, while virus and spyware protection did not.

The fallout of that decision has been inevitable and painful: Users have found their computers invaded and hijacked by rogue software, then have received little or no help from Microsoft in cleaning up these problems. They haven't even gotten a simple way to back up their data before reformatting the sick computer's hard drive and reinstalling Windows from scratch.

Helping you keep your computer safe and functional should have been Microsoft's job all along. OneCare finally makes some amends for that.

But if you don't want to use OneCare, you don't have to. Unlike Microsoft's most infamous bundled program, the Internet Explorer Web browser, OneCare is completely optional. You can spend your money on somebody else's bundle of security, maintenance and backup software -- or you can put together your own combination of free programs if you're willing to tinker a little more.

It's fair to argue that something like OneCare ought to be built into Windows. But think about what would happen next: The competition would probably find its air supply cut off, as people flee from the cost and complexity of adding third-party replacements for something built into Windows. And recent history has shown that Microsoft tends to slack off if it doesn't feel a competitive threat -- witness how Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer stagnated until iTunes and Firefox got Microsoft's attention.

With OneCare, Microsoft is trying to clean up its own mess while preserving competition. That's especially important in the security-software market, where many of the companies that have dominated it so far seem to have adopted Microsoft's worst habits of sloth.

The all-in-one suites from Symantec, McAfee and other third-party developers can work just fine, but too often they break in one way or another, jamming the machinery of Windows in the process. These problems can be some of the hardest to diagnose and fix, thanks to the complicated ways these security applications embed themselves into the system.

Readers tell these stories all the time: A mail program stops getting new messages, or a Web browser mysteriously fails to load certain Web sites -- and only after prolonged trial and error does it become clear some component in some security suite has gone bad. And each new annual release somehow fails to do much to address these issues.

Why shouldn't Microsoft, a company that knows -- or ought to know -- Windows better than anyone, take a stab at fixing these problems?

If OneCare can do the job better than other companies' security software, Microsoft will have earned every penny of whatever profit this service generates. If, on the other hand, not even Microsoft can reliably defend its own operating system, then things are even worse than we've thought.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.