Free is an ideal price point for Microsoft Security Essentials

Market share analysis shows it grew 2.5 percent in Q4

There’s an expression that when you get something for free, you get what you pay for, but that admonition doesn’t seem to phase users of the free Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) antivirus software. A new market share analysis shows that in the fourth quarter of 2010, MSE’s share of the North American antivirus market grew by 2.5 percent to a 10.39 percent share from the this quarter.

The report by OESIS OK, a unit of software development tools vendor Opswat, says MSE led the North American market for antivirus share growth in the fourth quarter, and that three of the four top antivirus products “detected globally” were free; the others being Avast Free Antivirus and AVG Anti-Virus Free.

Microsoft Security Essentials, version 2.0 of which was released Dec. 16, is free to consumers and businesses with up to 10 PCs; enterprises will still want to shell out money for more robust security like Microsoft Forefront Client Security. But the OESIS report documents that free is catching on: 58 percent of survey respondents said they were using a free solution in the fourth quarter, up from 42 percent who said so in the third quarter.

This trend bodes ill for Symantec, whose commercial Norton antivirus line still is the leader in North America with 16.45 percent market share in Q4, but which suffered a drop from 16.67 percent in Q3. An analysis by a site called Trefis.com, which studies the impact of a company’s products on its stock price, showed that Symantec is not only threatened by Microsoft but by McAfee, which is in the process of being acquired by Intel. Besides the impact of that synergy on Symantec, MSE also enjoys the synergy of its integration with Windows.

But do you get what you pay for with free antivirus software? Trefis reported that in a test, MSE caught 98 percent of more than a half million malware samples, second only to Symantec. Various blog forums such as this one debate the question of whether MSE is adequate compared to commercial antivirus software. The consensus is that while several people prefer Symantec, MSE is more than adequate, one noting that MSE provides active protection, meaning it intervenes to stop a virus from attacking in real time.

• Microsoft
• Anti-malware