Bonum Certa Men Certa

Negligence at Microsoft, Not 'Market Share', Causes Major Technical Problems

Not a victim of "success"

Swing



Summary: Microsoft's vanity about market share is being used as a distractor in face of allegations that its software is inherently shoddy

THE MONOPOLIST (poor Microsoft) loves blaming its illegally-earned market share on the desktop for security problems, but as we explained yesterday, this is a nonsensical argument and it is negligence [1, 2, 3] -- not installed base -- which makes software vulnerable. Vista 7 is not secure and even Microsoft's fanbase is willing to admit this. And in Windows, the "latest hole will soon be patched after a decade of vulnerability," says a blogger. It is not the first such example of belated patching. If Microsoft's installed base is the reason exploitable errors can be found, why has it taken a decade? The matter of fact is, less auditing of code lowers the quality of the code. Developers can get away with terrible programming practices and security is assumed to be assured by secrecy, not peer review that requires full transparency. This explains not only why Microsoft software is not secure but also why it is of such low quality (which makes the coders embarrassed to show it). As mentioned briefly in the daily links, Microsoft Fog Computing turns out to be as unreliable as its desktop-side software:



Customers on BPOS in the US and worldwide were kicked off their hosted Exchange email systems, being unable to read, write, or access their messages. All users were affected – from down in the cubicle farm all the way up to the CEO's corner office. The outages started Tuesday and came after weeks of the service slowly degrading.


In conclusion, secret code is shoddy code. Free code is high-quality code. The more a stack uses components like Linux and Apache, the more solid it is likely to be. Every day I write software that will be freely shared; the visibility of the code comes with a burden -- the burden that the code should actually be decent and well tested, not "spaghetti" as Vista's codebase was once referred to as.

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