Great article, and I couldn't agree more. Microsoft announced their so-called "Trustworthy Computing" initiative 3 years ago, and what really do they have to show for it? Clearly, nobody would expect them to be able to make their OS totally secure overnight, but geez, 3 years have gone by now with "security" supposedly being their top priority, and at least in my view, I've seen nothing of any significance being done by Microsoft at all in that regard. (Sorry but Service Packs don't count as security improvements, especially when those same Service Packs open up new vulnerabilities.) If anything, it seems that the rate at which new vulnerabilities are discovered is increasing rather than slowing, which hardly seems like a measure of success.

The longer this goes on, the more likely it will be for large corporations to abandon insecure OS's, and sooner or later the erosion of their customer base will pose a distinct threat to their survival. Maybe that's when Redmond will finally take security seriously. Clearly making Windows secure would be a huge undertaking, but then again, today's security problems exist precisely because of Microsoft's technical decisions from yesterday. Just my 2 cents as usual -- J.W.

Wow. A damning indictement and yet I find nothing to disagree with.

Yeah. The article is really good. The odd thing is that whenever I point these facts out to windoze users IN THE ACADEMIA (believe it or not, such people actually do exist), instead of debating my points with valid , intelligent arguments, they seem to lash out like a republican, resorting to name calling and insults to drown out their ignorance and penchant for wasting government grant money on proprietary operating systems.

Perhaps these graphs could change their minds:
Windows XP: http://secunia.com/graph/?type=fro&period=all&prod=22
Linux 2.6.x: http://secunia.com/graph/?type=fro&period=all&prod=2719

Already showed 'em: http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~daneel/fkbill/index.html

Didn't help. Got derided even more. Like I always say, you can't educate the uneducable.

Be careful when comparing windows to a complete distro, it often looks like there are more vulnerabilities when in fact you are comparing an OS with lots of applications to a basic os and not much more.

SP2 is a joke.

I've just recently had to roll back my XP-only machine to SP1, just so I could get it to stay up for more that 3 hours. And apart from the various IE "fixes" (which don't matter because everyone here uses Firefox - I made it the default browser, deleted the IE icon from the destop, and changed the Firefox shortcut to Internet Explorer. No one notices it still says Firefox in the title bar.), there were no real benefits. Everything that was in SP2 was available via 3rd parties for years before, MS just wanted their own, harder to use, self-branded version. Norton and Zonealarm serve me well.

If I was Mr. Gates, I'd start work on rewriting the core now, straight from the Linux kernel, then give it it's pretty GUI, then shock all the nasty adware makerswhen the discover their exploits no longer work :P

As far as I'm concerned, Windows is on its death bed. The vulnerabilities and flaws are too deeply embedded in its design to be corrected with simple updates and patches. A complete re-write from the ground up is required, creating an entirely new beast with the same skin. But MS can't and won't do that, because that would mean changing all the API's and proprietary formats that they use to keep their monopoly. They are stuck, plain and simple. It won't happen soon, but it will happen.

With nearly 86% of the computing world using Microsoft OS's, I don't think we'd be throwing parties on the demise of Windows in a hurry. But if the situation fails to improve in the next 3-4 years, Microsoft would be really walking on the edge.
With competition toughening, this could precipitate sooner than expected, however incredible it may seem. What with the Chinese and other Far-east nations working on developing a native OS, time's running short for Microsoft to brush up its act.

I agree, corbis_demon. The party won't be soon, but it is on the horizon. Microsoft is on its way down unless some drastic changes are made. You have to give Gates and crew some credit though. It is a testament to their genius in business matters that a group of faulty products have been used to build the largest financial empire in history. One has to wonder if they would be as successful marketing other products. Maybe a line of cars that die 3-4 times a day? A tank with large holes in, covered only by duct tape with colorful butterflies printed on it?

As it is today Microsoft will go down. But I am afraid that Gates, Ballmer and the rest will not give up that easy. I think they are a little too smart to keep with the bugs and flaws that exists today. Even if they may not change the whole platform and rebuild it, they might at least try a major rewrite of the code, cause I am afraid that they soon will understand that only patches is not the solution. There are many people that will continue to fight for Microsoft's domination and they will do what they can to make Microsoft's products better. We saw an example of their efforts when Netscape competed with IE, or how Windows was able to surf on the wave when computers went from universities and institutions to the common man.

As I see it (and this is only opinions, no facts) there are products from the Linux-community (GNU-community, whatever) which are as easy to use and setup as the products from Redmond. Xandros or Mandrake running KDE can be too easy for us people who want power instead of an easy-to-control interface, but at least Windows can't claim to be the easiest anymore. Windows are about to loose the "Office suite"-domination when OpenOffice.org matures and Mozilla makes an alternative to Outlook. Windows does not have, and will never have (I hope) a domination over the security part, and it lacks stability and performance (IMO), something a Linux-based system do have. As I see it, there is only one thing left: support. The problem is that not enough companies make their products (software and hardware) support Linux.

For us to grow we must get better support. We must support more hardware so Linux can run smoothly without too much tweaking (we will get less problems to play with, but we will destroy Microsoft, is it worth it?). We must have more drivers from the manufactures themselves, a group of geeks sitting in their apartment, porting/writing drivers for their favorite video-card is not enough. We need the manufactures to support Linux.

But I think it is looking bright for us. I have heard that Nvidia will support Linux more, and that Adobe will release a photoshop version for Linux. And there are certainly more companies out there, starting to support Linux more.

As a final word I want to say that "I have a dream", that I will be able to tell my children that "when I was young, there was one thing called Microsoft".

Yes, support from major players in the hardware industry seems to be our biggest hurdle right now. But support is growing. nVidia (do you capitalize that if it is at the beginning of a sentence? haha) just release a new GNU/Linux driver which FINALLY seems to have fixed the long-standing issue with the X server freezing if AGP support was turned on. Now, IMHO, ATi can't just sit on their lousy Linux drivers for much longer. I see posts from people all over the net saying that they switched or are thinking of switching to an nVidia based card to replace their ATi card just for the superior (though still somewhat lacking) support nVidia has for GNU/Linux. And these people are just Ma & Pa computer shoppers. These are the people buying the X800's and 9800's, your high-end money-making cards. So I think we will see better support from ATi soon, while nVidia continues to improve their support.

And don't forget that we also have IBM, Sun, Novell and others throwing what support they can towards Linux. According to this article, even Intel is starting to support Linux, albeit under the radar of Microsoft. I think that even the "big boys" in the industry would like to squeeze their way out from under M$'s thumb a little bit.

I personally don't think that the current PTB at Microsoft have the ability to crush GNU/Linux as a competitor. Their busniess model isn't designed to compete with something like Linux, and I don't think they can adapt it to do so. And an ability to adapt is Linux's greatest strength. We have distributions for the general End User like Mandrake, Linspire, and Xandros. And he have distros for the enthusiasts and power users. This is how it is on the hardware side of the technology industry, and this is how it should be on the software/OS side. On the hardware end, you have companies like Dell and Gateway for the end user that just want to buy a complete, out-of-the-box computer and don't care what is under the hood. Then you have companies like ATi, nVidia, Western Digital, Ultra, etc that produce various "performance" parts so that the enthusiast can build his own machine from the ground up with exactly the parts he wants. Linux can and does cater to both types of users in the OS market. Microsoft cannot do this. The only strong point they have is ease-of-use...and even that is questionable.

I think the way to look at GNU/Linux is not as an OS in the traditional sense, but as a set of tools to BUILD an OS, for any purpose and for any user. This is why I think that we (the GNU/Linux community) can offer something better to the multitude of general user's out there than M$ can. Microsoft designs its OS to its own specifications and then forces the consumers into catagories to fit with their own OS offerings (XP Home users, XP Pro users, NT users, CE users, Media Center Users, etc). GNU/Linux can be adapted to serve the CONSUMER. It is the People's Operating System, while Windows is just a Piece Of S<explitive deleted>.

As somebody I don't know once said, "The times...they are a changin'."

We are the Pengiuns, and we are Legion.

Damn well put. Thanks, drowbot. You really spoke my mind, could not have said it better myself. This is also why one can't fairly compare Windows to Linux, GNU or a distro. The GNU/Linux-community is so much different than the world of Microsoft and they can't be compared, still that is what the folks in Redmond do all day.

History is replete with great technologies that have never seen the light of day, due to either being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or due to the superior marketing acument of bigger companies. Go read up about Tucker in the 40s and his cars.

Windows was brilliantly manuevered into a modern day monopoly but shrewd selling and partnerships. If you want to blame companies for letting MS take over, blame the ones who gave away the market: Apple and IBM.

Microsoft is not on their death bed, unfortunately. Windows is still ubiquitious on the desktop, and none of the major PC Manufacturers even bothers to promote Linux or sells a decent percentage here.

Linux is a far way from challenging MS on the desktop. What it has done is smack MS upside the head in the small server market, as Apache/PHP servers running Linux took away Bills big attempt at being a true power, owning the midrange market because they were just too good not to use. That's where the immediate future for Linux is.

Until Linux has a killer app or reason for people to use it on the desktop, I don't see the majority of users who are non technical to consider switching to it. Especially as MS makes more and more shady deals to ensure Windows is everywhere.