Another small success

Many of you noticed the announcement last week about Microsoft's intent to provide free anti-virus and anti-spyware for Windows. We have kept quite about it for a few days to make sure the press moves along, but we would like you all to know how we were able to broker this deal behind the scenes.

We had three separate campaigns running:

1. Craig has been working with Microsoft's salespeople all around the world and "encouraging" them (we won't go into exact methods) to sell fewer and fewer licenses of Microsoft Live OneCare. Our theory was (and it appears to have worked) that tanking sales would force Microsoft to release something better and cheaper.
2. I have been working on a project (codename: TwoCares) for some time. It involves sending as many minidumps (you know, when something stops working and it asks you if you want to send it to Microsoft) to Microsoft as possible, and we have used all the resources at our disposal to generate them and send them. It's amazing how much minidump data a High-Performance Computing cluster can produce in the course of an afternoon! We're not sure how this affected Microsoft's decision, but we know that they were much more willing to work with us once we offered to stop pursuing TwoCares.
3. Juliana has been working with Google to provide alternatives to OneCare. Google's offerings are generally much trendier than Microsoft's, and so we thought that might help.

With these three campaigns working in tandem it was only a matter of time before Microsoft gave in. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not inventive!