Not a Great Look (Premium)

This past weekend, Microsoft issued a one-two punch to its critics. First, it had the audacity to blame EU antitrust regulators for forcing it to change Windows in such a way that it weakened its security and was the real culprit in the CrowdStrike outage. And then Frank Shaw, a senior Microsoft executive, lashed out at reporters for not doing their jobs: If we had just known the history, he argued, perhaps we wouldn't have all blamed Microsoft for the problems.

Frank's comment read like a challenge. But despite being heavily invested in Windows for my entire adult life, I came up short trying to remember the event that Microsoft was referring to. And so I dove into my archives to see what I had written on this topic.

There was an obvious starting point. According to The Wall Street Journal report that contained this finger pointing, Microsoft had been forced by the European Commission (EC) in 2009 to open up Windows to third-party security companies, giving them the same level of access to Windows that it gets itself.

But I couldn't find anything like that in my extensive archives. And so I broadened the search.

Then I landed it. In the October 17, 2006 issue of the Windows IT Pro UPDATE, I discussed some late-breaking changes to Windows Vista just ahead of its release to address the concerns of antitrust regulators in the EU and South Korea: It made its XPS (XML Paper Specification) an international standard to appease Adobe (which had correctly accused Microsoft of copying PDF), provided a search provider verification screen in Internet Explorer 7 to appease Google (which had complained about Windows Live Search being the default search in that browser), and made a security-related change that had to be what the WSJ was referencing.

"To address security company concerns, Microsoft is making three changes to Windows Vista," I wrote. "It will provide APIs so that [security] companies can interact with the Patch Guard (or Kernel Patch Protection) feature in x64 versions of Windows. It will provide a second set of APIs so that these companies can bypass Windows Security Center, but only when they offer a competing dashboard that duplicates all the notification features from Security Center. And finally, Microsoft will advertise third-party security products in the Windows Welcome Center that appears when users first boot into Windows. This will give these companies equal access to customers that Microsoft provides for its own products and services."

Taken together, those three security-related changes make sense in the context of an antitrust complaint: Microsoft, which dominated personal computing and was a convicted monopolist, was putting many more security controls into Windows, which obviously benefits consumers, but it was also competing with third-party companies whose businesses were negatively impacted by the changes. This is an age-old problem for platform makers like Microsoft; when Apple does this, it's accused...

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