Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

Strong suit? demand?

If MSFT's strong suit isn't security it's not merely because the market has not historically refused to buy insecure products when they were recognized as such, but because unlike some other alternative solutions, MSFT's solutions are not engineered by people with a very sophisticated grasp of security. MSFT has falsely claimed its code had been so thoroughly audited of buffer-overflows that the buffer overflow was over as an MS-Windows attack type. MSFT apparently can't recognize its vulnerabilities even when deliberately looking for them.

MSFT continues to be able to sell its products for a few major reasons:

(1) File-format lock. People want into the data they handled last week, and MSFT does not only not document the file formats it uses, but ensures the target keeps moving to prevent reverse-engineering. Now, we also see MSFT will use patents to prevent reverse-engineering: MSFT is offering to LICENSE to flash RAM vendors the use of the FAT file system (yes, the one that was obsoleted in 1996 because it didn't handle names longer than 8 chars and a 3-char extension). Not FAT32, not NTFS ... FAT. Crazy. You want into a document created with MS-Word without hozing its formatting and content? You can't license THAT, you have to buy MS-Word, complete with open ports and security holes.

(2) Ignorance. People don't generally have a very good understanding of security, so they look for the buzz-words on teh box and can't tell what they're missing. Password authentication? 256-bit encryption? I'm safe! Heh, but what they don't know, and MSFT either lies about or is ignorant of, is how the whole enchilada works together and how it falls apart in the middle. Security nuts prefer Unix

(3) FUD. People accept because they hear that a computing monoculture creates efficiencies, and that M$ is the vendor to sell it to them, despite the clear fact that buying IIS servers and standardizing people on Outlook is suicide for security of both networks and all the individual machines on which they sit. You use network attached storage? Muhuhahaha! As for the security of the underlying OS, M$ simply trots out a mouth every so often to say, "We used to be slower and insecure but we're better now. And we're cheaper than Linux." The evidence is that for a firewall, you need a machine that is good at firewalls and not an M$ product. And that for a high-performance mailserver, Postfix is miles ahead of Exchange, which requires a whole roomful of Compaq/IBM machines to handle what one Linux box from IBM will do. Webserving? Heh. When was the last time your server was attacked by an Apache installation? What server do you want running inside your network? ROFL.

(4) Anticompetitive tactics. Since HP and IBM are major Windows licensees, and IBM proved to the world when it allowed OS/2 to be smothered that one can't fight M$ effectively while required to bargain for Windows license terms, it's pretty clear that HP and IBM will have increasing difficulty peddling Linux and the like to their own customers, as M$ will require absurd things like bundled licenses with every machine sold, or else a highway-robbery licensing rate on the licenses actually shipped. Funding litigation against Linux vendors and users is also classic FUD: SCO hasn't in all this time ever said what property it thinks was misappropriated or by which individuals in what commits to whose Linux tree ... and nobody seems to take SCO's hijack attempt seriously any more ... but M$ has given SCO millions to run with it. The winner: SCO's law firm. SCO is too distracted to do any real work while this is underway, and its shareholders will be screwed. The cap to the anticompetitive tactics appears to be Palladium, a system which will allow software vendors to ram down consumers' throats the most onerous possible licensing terms, and because of (1)-(3) above, many will not have an opportunity to resist. Then when they discover all their files -- THEIR files, with THEIR data -- are encrypted and depend on licensing fees being regularly paid just to read them ... and the files can't be opened on a non-palladium computer because they lack the digital credentials needed to get through the DRM on all the files ... and cracking it is a DMCA violation ... heh ... then they're really screwed.

So I am happy I decided I could not afford to use M$ solutions in my business or personal life; I've avoided some outrageous licensing fees, some terrifying security blunders, and have kept my server up and my laptop churning away productively for several years.

Heh, too bad for Apple my machine still runs fine ... but then, my experience with it has sold several more and I don't think they'll ever go back. I am keen to see what is done for the small business segment with existing open-source tools. This could be a good battleground for Apple and other alternative OS vendors, as the market shudders at M$' pricing and legal tactics. I mean, when did a group from Linux or FreeBSD ever require a school district to account for all their installed copies and licenses? I don't think others can afford to use M$' product much more than I can, it's just taking them longer to see it.

--Tex.