"Morro" in the cloud: a retraction and apology

Earlier this week I wrote a post defining "Morro", what it is, what it does and separating fact from fiction. I'll get the harsh truth out first: I was wrong, quite a bit wrong, and it's not easy to admit to it but it needs to be said. I decided this evening after receiving more confirmed information on the product to draft this, and release now once it was appropriate to do so.

I had spent many hours researching "Morro", now known as Microsoft Security Essentials, as well as background reading on possible connections to the software. As I try and write about developing technologies, this would have been something to report - Microsoft being the first organisation to develop a cloud anti-virus - in terms of timeline anyway, we know Panda released theirs first.

I also spent a lot of time speaking to friends and colleagues, especially last month, trying to find information on Morro. In some of the conversations, I was led to believe that Windows Azure would be a foundation platform of which Morro would be developed upon. As Morro is based on ForeFront and Windows Defender, being developed by the ForeFront team, and as ForeFront had made its way to Azure, I connected the dots. This was my interpretation of what I knew at the time, rather than the miscommunication from one particular person.

I used an article, written by the Guardian, which as a reputable source of information almost concreted my theory that Morro would be based in the cloud. We now know this is not the case.

In terms of me explaining how I thought Morro would work - this was purely opinionated and best guess-work on my part, if you will. By explaining how I thought it would work may well help others understand how I considered the system to work. Few links were provided during this part of the post, simply because I didn't have the fact to back it up with. For me, I write posts as I do essays: when I want to source them, I'll reference them, but in a blog environment it is better with a link, rather than a bibliography on each post.

Maybe now, you can see I was misguided, headstrong on my own opinion but also felt I was right in what I was writing and saying at the time of publication. I had no will nor want to deceive or cause confusion, but we all make mistakes. I hope I can recover from this one by apologising here in the open and admitting I was wrong at the time.

I'm issuing a retraction to the article found here, and my utmost and most sincere apologies for misinterpreting my research and my understanding. I also apologise for the editors of blogs and websites who linked back to my post, and based their opinions around mine. The problem with a popular blog on a very popular network is people expect accuracy and often a reputation proceeds with it. When a big network appears to get it wrong, the aftermath and fallout from that single post can spread far and wide. This I thoroughly regret.

For an accurate, up to date (as of this post's publication), please visit Mary Jo Foley's "All About Microsoft" blog or Ed Bott's Microsoft Report.