Stories by: Richard Stiennon

Dear President Obama:

My Top Ten Worst Uses for Windows post last week caused somewhat of a firestorm of reaction. It is worth pointing out that for the most part I am not really criticizing Windows just the use of a bloated OS for simple or mission critical tasks.

After all these years I am willing to admit that Microsoft has won the desktop and server wars. Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent.

There was a workshop on the Economics of Information Security held at Cambridge in England last June. Studying the economics of information security is, to me, absurdly trivial. It is like studying the economics of operating a trading desk, an interesting pursuit for the accountants at Schwab and eTrade but completely irrelevant to what is going on in the real economy.