Windows Live OneCare

Microsoft announced the release of Windows Live OneCare®, their combination security suite at a price of $49.95 per year. At this price, OneCare will cover up to 3 PC's. Microsoft also offers a 90 day free trial of OneCare, which is currently only available in the U.S.

OneCare includes anti-virus and anti-spyware scanners an a "managed" two-way firewall. OneCare also includes functions to regularly defragment your hard drive and even has functions to backup and restore your important files and settings to CD, DVD or external hard drive.

I expect that a free trial of OneCare will come packaged with any copy of Windows, whether retail, retail upgrade, or pre-installed versions.

OneCare will be an annual subscription service, purchased directly from Micrososft. When you think about the economics of this compared to packaging a product and then selling it to distributors for subsequent resale, OneCare is poised to be as big a moneymaker for Microsoft as is Windows.

Whether it destroys the competition or not will depend on how many consumers buy into the concept of paying Microsoft for a separate service to block the security holes in Microsoft's software.