It is sadly a familiar story in security software. A very good freeware program is developed. In this case, by Tall Emu. Program gets bought out - in this case by Emsisoft. Program gets incorporated into a paid product. The free product disappears. Finally Emsisoft drops paid product and support altogether. Miss the days of Tall EMU and Online Armor and now the Emsisoft forum is history.
Software development is not charity; Online Armor was a niche software that didnt make enough to pay development costs, so why Emsisoft should maintain it? Actually you should thank Emisisoft because without it Online Armor would be dead much earlier.
A moment of clarity,... Emsisoft was bought out. I deserve to be embarrassed for not knowing that. And EEK still remains one of my fave 2nd opinion scanners. What's to do.
Don't forget Mamutu- Just me but Emsisoft if they wanted could easily proven some generosity in releasing it as a standalone freeware to the public as their token of appreciation for the years of commitment by their users of the other programs. Or allow it to become Open Source where it could be picked up and further developed and improved. Yes a sadly familiar story that it is.
Mamutu was a tech spin-off of the main Anti-Malware product to demonstrate that pure behavior blocking can do a decent light-weight protection job too. Unfortunately, the product was way ahead of its time and the market didn't appreciate the concept, so we merged it back into the main product. Similar tech runs under the term 'nextgen AV' these days. In retrospective, we probably should have dropped the scan engine instead and fully focused on behavior blocking and cloud based detection only back then. Would have saved us a lot of the detours that we had to make to get to where we are today. Online Armor was already set to end before we acquired it. Rescuing it was an attempt to widen our product range for consumers. All 'suites' back then had a firewall included and we were competing mainly with consumer AV suites. The strategy worked well for a while, but truth is, the commercial consumer AV segment is slowly dying (thanks to Defender and all the other fully grown freeware suites today) and the Online Armor codebase was already way too complex, fragmented and full of techniques that Microsoft stopped supporting at the time. Towards the end we only had the choice of re-writing it completely from scratch using modern tech (which would have taken several man-years to do) or drop it altogether. At the time, about 5-6 years ago, we re-invited re-invented Emsisoft as a business/professional focused cybersecurity company and dropped a lot of tech debt to be able to move forward with cloud based detection and centralized management much faster. Ending some of the non-profitable and experimental products was just a logical consequence of that strategy. It clearly paid off.
Oh wow, I was always wondering about Online Armor and to be fair, there must have been explanations about its disappearance more than once long ago, but this time, it stuck. Thanks for the comprehensive explanation. There are other products that can step in but never quite fill its shoes, in my opinion.
"At the time, about 5-6 years ago, we re-invited Emsisoft as a business/professional focused cybersecurity company and dropped a lot of tech debt to be able to..." Eh? Don't you mean reinvigorated?
I cringe ever time I read about Online Armor. It was in a league all it's own and was a pleasure to been around when it made it's debut until it concluded.
@emsisoft I want to remind something what Mike said and something special for Wilders users https://onlinearmorpersonalfirewall.blogspot.com/2010/06/online-armor-sold-to-emsisoft.html?m=1
When circumstances change, one must change one's previously stated intentions. If you don't do it, it can lead to the demise of your own company. This is of no use to anyone.
I dont know what some of you guys were expecting from Emsisoft, they are not a huge company with unlimited cash to burn in niche software that doesnt make profit. Do you guys actually know how much it would cost annually to keep Online Armor alive? Of course you dont know and dont care, you are just an average internet user trying to impose your geek needs in a private company. I am glad that Christian @emsisoft is the CEO of Emsisoft because if it were one of you it probably wont exist in today market, but keep being delusional only looking for your own belly.
I do, Fabian Wosar posted it, I dont have the link for now with actual costs, but I will sure post it here. But for now we have those posts: https://malwaretips.com/threads/ems...to-its-bb-technology.72095/page-5#post-636026 https://malwaretips.com/threads/emsisoft-2019-2-preparing-for-a-big-leap.90875/#post-801747 Edit: Now I see that you were the user questioning Fabian Wosar about this in the past, I guess you know better than him right? https://malwaretips.com/threads/emsisoft-2019-2-preparing-for-a-big-leap.90875/#post-801778
Christian, just want to say: appreciate your popping up here. Still the personal touch, remarkable. Long-standing Emsisoft user.
I'm still curious: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/emsisoft-to-close-its-forum.445808/#post-3093003
I'm afraid the current installer won't run on deprecated systems anymore, sorry. You could try with an older installer but honestly I don't know how it behaves. We're only including fully supported versions in our regular test procedures.
Emsisoft supported Online Armor for at least 5 years after its acquisition, did Symantec acted in a similar way?