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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (67239)	4/13/2002 5:51:23 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I would be very surprised if Microsoft manages to do more than squashing some existing bugs. Creating secure software is very much about organization - promoting those programmers that create secure code and firing those programmers that created Internet Explorer, MS Office etc. It also requires Microsoft to reduce marketing's influence on product design. Most of these things will kill Microsoft, so they'll probably squash some bugs, be better at not creating bugs in the future, change some default settings (which will annoy customers) and continue being the creator of the most insecure software around. Another basic problem is that as long as Microsoft products are backwards compatible, the choice is between functionality and security. And security on Windows is already almost incomprehensible to many ordinary Windows users. In this area, Microsoft cannot beat the competition, Linux. Daily Linux security management is fairly easy to understand to endusers and at high security level the functionality is not reduced. When people ask me about how I can live without MSIE, I often ask them, how they can live with only MSIE. Remember, that if you use MSIE and want it secure, it won't do Java, Javascript, ActiveX, flash, shockwave etc. It also won't download Word files from your web e-mail. It will show Microsofts homepage, but it won't do homebanking. Netscape/Mozilla does it all (except ActiveX) and with Red Hat Network, any known exploits are patched very fast (although none have been found yet afaik). If you compare a secure Linux and a secure Windows, Linux wins in all categories and users would get very frustrated at Windows and not use it much. I know this from my own experience in companies that have both. Dybdahl.