David Coursey's Smug Punditry

Coursey is eWeek's smug tech pundit who trades on being difficult to please. He'd do well to trade on discernment and common sense.

In a pre-Christmas piece, he pretty much gives Vista beta the snore. But, there, he says something so lacking in business sense that it compels one to reevaluate his entire ouvre of snotty, cantankerous tech-advisory.

Giving away complete malware protection is the right thing for Microsoft to do for all its operating systems, not just Vista.

Now, if Microsoft gave away anti-virus software for free, that would kill McAfee and Symantec, the last remaining friends Microsoft has got. Moreover, there is very little sense in Microsoft being in the anti-virus business since it represents a conflict of interest plus they could put the same energy into the basic code and achieve far more security, enough perhaps to lower the importance of anti-virus software for their users.

The statement is off-the-cuff, speculative and uninformed. No, actually it's an old CIA disinformation technique: feigned objectivity, pretending to be damanding of both sides, pretending to be hard on his client (Microsoft) too. The agent must be smart, be correct, to pull this trick off.

So, it should give readers of eWeek pause before they take anything David Coursey has to say at face value. He not even a very good lier. Doesn't even have that going for him.