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Windows Live OneCare Grabs Second Place (already!)
Nathan Weinberg
Contributing Writer
2006-08-16
 Security News RSS Feed
Microsoft debuted Windows Live OneCare to the marketplace at the end of May at a retail price of $49.99 (and many stores offering it for as little as $19.99).
In June, OneCare accounted for an astounding 15 percent of the market, amazing for a brand new product. Clearly, OneCare has a decent chance of winning this thing very quickly, gobbling up market share every month from the established players.
This may also be an indication that (a) other security software is overpriced at $100 for a suite, considering that the operating system costs less than that and (b) the other companies, like Norton, have developed almost no brand loyalty, due to buggy, resource-hogging software.
Of course, even though Microsoft grabbed 15% of sales, it only got 8.2% of sales dollars, showing that price doesn't help. Conversly, Microsoft's $20 costs Norton $100 with every sale.Microsoft's new product - which includes a two-way personal firewall, anti-virus scanning, automated backup, and PC tuning utilities - hit Symantec's sales the hardest. According to NPD, Symantec's unit share of the consumer suite market dropped from 69.9 percent in May to 59.8 percent in June; its dollar share also fell, from 74.1 percent to 68 percent. The other vendors that sell at retail, including McAfee and Trend Micro, weren't as affected by Microsoft's entry. Hopefully, Microsoft can market OneCare well enough to the legions of new PC buyers who let their initial Norton trial subscriptions expire and pick up those customers as well.
The simplest way to grab that market: Make sure Windows Vista bugs the hell out of users, on a daily basis, if they don't have an active antivirus.
Those annoyed users will hop down to Best Buy, and when they see OneCare on the shelf for twenty bucks, they'll pick that up.
(via Digg)
Tag: OneCare, Microsoft
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About the Author:
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
Visit the InsideGoogle blog.
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