AVID: The Allchin Stumble

In this posting, I suppose AVID should be taken to stand for AntiVirus In Dismay—in dismay at the pronouncements of Microsoft’s Jim Allchin. First of all, Jim Allchin appeared to claim that Vista didn’t need Antivirus software. He actually said (in a telephone conference) that he would be comfortable with his seven year-old son using a Vista machine without any antivirus software installed. So stories flashed around the web suggesting that there was no need for AV on Vista.

There must have been heart attacks in AV vendor boardrooms everywhere—the truth being that it’s only Windows that has vulnerability to viruses. There’s no big market in selling AV on the Mac or Linux. If Vista is even close to virus-proof than the AV vendors can close up shop.

Now it may be that someone in Microsoft bent Allchin’s ear and pointed out that Microsoft itself was in the Vista AV market or it may be that Jim himself never meant to say what he appeared to say. Er.. So, “he would be comfortable with his seven year-old son using a Vista machine without any antivirus software”, why? Because, he’s always wanted to see how a 7 year old responds to getting a virus infection? Anyway, lo and behold, the web is suddenly awash with stories about how Allchin believes that AV is indeed necessary for Vista (but only if you don’t happen to be his 7 year old son).

He also used his blog in an attempt to de-gaff the situation, writing: “After reading the transcript, I could certainly see that what I said wasn’t as clear as it could have been, and I’m sorry for that. However, it is also clear from the transcript that I didn’t say that users shouldn’t run anti-virus software with Windows Vista! In fact, later in the call, I explicitly made this point again, because I had realised I wasn’t as clear as I should have been.” So are you clear now?

The sad truth is that AV software is ineffective anyway, so this is all a non-story. The only effective way to prevent malware from infecting computers is to run the authentication-based software from companies such as Savant Security, AppSense, SecureWave and Bit9. These products do the job, and they’ll do it for all kinds of malware and the technical approach they take would be effective on any computer and they would work for Jim Allchin’s 7 year old son too.

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