Microsoft Apologists
States struggling to maintain antitrust against Microsoft. The antitrust charges miss the leading flaw of Microsoft: massive security problems from an inferior product that no consumer should rightly pay for.
Microsoft systems are the most compromised system on the Internet. Millions of hacked Microsoft systems participate in zombie networks. Anti-virus software, forever out of date against new threats, tracks many thousands of viruses and malware for Microsoft. In response to these charges, Microsoft defenders always trot out the “well, if Linux had as large a market share as Windows, then Linux would have more malware and thereby zombie networks and so forth.”
This argument is inane. Notice the quick subject change from the clear and present danger of Microsoft systems to rampant speculation. The apologist hopes the conversation will be wasted arguing about a subjective claim of vulnerability equality in totally different code bases, not the fact that Microsoft systems have been and remain deeply and widely compromised.
Defenders, if pressed, will claim “well, you need to support Microsoft systems properly”. True, because Windows is needlessly insecure, and therefore a poor choice for consumers who does not know about these hidden costs. For HIPAA, SOX, and PCI compliance, Windows systems must run anti-virus software. Linux systems can bypass this requirement by virtue of not being Windows. On Linux, the primary reason to run anti-virus software is to keep the malware as far away from the flawed Windows systems as possible. This means, unless someone can present compelling evidence to the contrary, Microsoft systems are more expensive and less secure, by virtue of requiring antivirus software.
Worse, this cost of running Microsoft is also passed on to any Unix system that must also run antivirus software to keep the big bad Internet away from Windows, firewalls that protect Windows systems, and other expenses.
Why do people support Microsoft? The software is both insecure and expensive!
Windows is also “business ugly” (my summary of the overall Windows experience), and needlessly buggy (“oh, yeah, Outlook 2007 will freeze when you do that, you should check for a new service patch”), but that’s a totally different rant.