We live in dangerous times nowadays. Spyware, adware and viruses are all feasting on the Windows platform. The number of security holes and potentially disasterous effects has gotten to the point where you can’t view a JPG image without the possibility of a takeover imminent. Horror stories are popping up even in columns in big mainstream USA newspapers - this isn’t just your ordinary geek forum conversational subject.
To some, the reason is obvious - Windows has over 90% of the market. It’s highly likely that such a great undertaking as an operating system will contain atleast a handful of potential exploits, and because of the enormous user base, there’s bound to be plenty of people that should be able to find those. And indeed there are. But consider if you will that the documented exploits and takeover attempts doesn’t scale with Windows’ demographic down to the UNIX-like OSes - Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, *BSD - with a total of around 7 or 8% of the world market share. The amount of trojans or viruses or even programs like them for OS X specifically - the UNIX-like OS with the most users (installed copies, not user accounts) in the world - can be counted on two or maybe even one hand. Facts in hand, the possibility that a Windows user can have her computer taken over by malware and viruses is larger than the “UNIX-like OS” user by several orders of magnitude.
The message, to some, is obvious. Switch! “Switch to Firefox to your browsing, Linux for your servers and OS X for your desktop,” the crowds yell. “Don’t stay on a virus-infested platform, or use a browser with backdoors.”
But people in general won’t. Companies have built up years of infrastructure - not to mention expertise - on Windows. Even the skip to Firefox can be daunting - “What about our brand new [yeah, in 1999!] web site with IE-specific DHTML and ActiveX controls out the wazoo?” And, as mentioned in the newspaper column (sort-of-)linked to above: “No one has lost their job for keeping Windows.” (This point was reiterated in John Gruber’s excellent “Good Times” essay a year ago.)
The one thing that bugs me - aside from the whole “$other_platform_or_browser is just a cult following” angle - is this, also from the column:
Individuals, though, might be tempted for reasons that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. This time, Microsoft hasn’t done anything particularly wrong; the hackers are the bad guys. Blaming Microsoft for not building in safety measures is a little like blaming Florida for being in the path of a hurricane.
In my opinion, this is wrongheaded thinking. Florida can’t be held responsible for its location and surrounding weather conditions. Microsoft and its teams, however, are very much responsible for the code they’ve written. Having not only subtle bugs but outright flaws and potential back holes in your system are not signs of good code. While it’s certainly human for something like this to happen given all the conditions, what Microsoft should have done when the first hole of this sort appeared a few months after XP was released was to get all their teams to look over their respective code for a few hours. With their enormous manpower, I’m sure a lot of these bugs could have been stopped before they each got discovered individually later on.
And it’s also, perhaps, this attitude that brings out the “Mac users are in a cult” or “Mac users take drugs” opinions. Any user of an OS with a history as rocky as Windows’ and a very high market share would be toughened. Computers are expected to go “BEEP BEEP BEEP” and delete your homework, or your Excel spreadsheets, or what have you, and when they don’t do that any longer, morons from all over the world keeps taking over your computer, step by step, from the re-setting of the home page via pop ups to the state where there’s no option left but to reinstall its OS. Surely a computer couldn’t be at least a little easier to use than that? And surely there can’t be a community where very little shit will be taken?
Note: The author of this article has been using Windows XP since the first public beta in 2000, and Mac OS X and Linux on secondary computers since early 2003. He grew up in a mixed Windows/Mac environment.