Microsoft shipped OneCare unfinished?

It was already clear that Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare isn't a best-in-class security product. Instead, OneCare is a newcomer that needs to mature. Now a Microsoft employee has said that the product shipped too soon.

"OneCare is a new product--they shouldn't have rolled it out when they did, but they're fixing the problems now," Arno Edelmann, Microsoft's European business security product manager, told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK last week.

In the ZDNet UK piece, Edelmann is quoted as saying that "bits and pieces are missing" from OneCare. Key parts of the trouble with the application lie in the update mechanism and the underlying antivirus engine, according to the article.

Since shipping in May, OneCare and exposed users to attack because of a security flaw in the antivirus engine. The application also incorrectly flagged Gmail as a virus and in some cases when a single e-mail was laden with a virus.