Microsoft has released a beta of it’s newest bastard child: Microsoft Security Essentials.  Those of you who were unimpressed with Microsoft OneCare will be equally unglad to know that Microsoft Security Essentials is basically just the antivirus part of OneCare.  Why?  The world may never know.  Especially when Grisoft gives you AVG Free and Avast gives you their own free antivirus, just to name a few.

Why Microsoft would release their own antivirus for Windows is understandable.  Not having antivirus these days is a b ig gaping security hole.

But why Microsoft would need to strip down OneCare into a smaller package and rename that Microsoft Security Essentials?  It seems rather silly.  It’d have made more sense to just have OneCare Basic and OneCare Professional or Premium or some such.  Or better yet, simply divide it all and let you pick and choose the OneCare features you want.

But that’s not the Microsoft way.

No.

So if you really really want it, you can go trial the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials if you like.

And if you don’t trust Microsoft with anything security related, for whatever many reasons you may have, there are always other free fish in the sea.