Stan Beer
Monday, 02 October 2006 10:00
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 2
The revelation that Vista was still vulnerable to exploits in the
critical class was a wake up call to many Windows users who may have
thought that Vista was going to provide the universal panacea for their
security issues. It was quite obvious that Vista will not see the
departure of Patch Tuesday, as some in Microsoft have claimed.
The security questions surrounding Vista have
been given added impetus by the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming
release in Europe. The European Commission (EC) has already expressed
concerns about Microsoft using its near monopoly on the desktop to
bundle security features with Vista and, in so doing, squeeze out third
party security providers.
A number of security vendors, including Symantec, are doing their best
to convince the EC to force Microsoft to unbundle security features
from Vista and to allow third party security vendors access to the
inner sanctum of the operating system kernel.
While some say that forcing Microsoft to unbundle its own security
products would be a victory for free competition, others say it will
just make Vista inherently less secure.
Aside from the security issue, there is the question of cost of moving
to Vista for users. Aside from the hefty cost of the software, Vista is
a resource hungry system that in many cases will require a hardware
upgrade.
No doubt many users will eventually bite the bullet and spend the money
for the hardware and software and upgrade to Vista. If so, will they
have any money left over to spend on that other new and expensive
software release from Microsoft, Office 2007?
Here's some food for thought for Microsoft. I have written this article
on a free web-based word processor called Zoho Writer. All I needed to
write the article was a computer with an internet connection,
regardless of the operating system. But that's another
story.