I saw this article on digg just now and I think it’s a brilliant move by Gates. Let me just say that Bill Gates is not an idiot. He knows that there is no such thing as perfect software (perhaps with the exception of QMail?). He also knows that software testing is also a long and expensive process that is not always complete. Put those pieces together and you can turn the initial users into software testers! To further elaborate, I think he’s trying to mock people into finding all of the bugs they can find and submit them to Microsoft to prove him wrong. Of course they will prove him wrong, but Microsoft will then fix those bugs accordingly and then be able to push their software on businesses because it will truly have no more bugs!
We remember the Windows RPC buffer overflow exploit, right? Well to refresh our memories, it existed up to Windows XP SP1 and allowed remote access to any vulnerable machine. That was a big embarrassment to Microsoft right there. If you encourage people to find as many bugs as possible when the user base is low, it’s not much as an embarrassment and a much smaller fire to extinguish if a major bug is found.
Of course this is all speculation/opinion, but wouldn’t that make for a great strategy?
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Interesting way of looking at it.
I’m more inclined Gates made a Bush-ism of sorts.
The quote was:
“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. ”
It’s clear that any tech-savvy person would see right through how much BS is in that statement. It doesn’t pose a challenge, so much as it insults the intelligence of those that know better and misleads consumers.
I would consider the possibility that this was just more intentional Microsoft FUD, but it seems a little too blatant to me.
Bill is no marketing person, so it’s not surprising that he would slip up the way he did. I’m willing to bet he simply wanted to tell people that there is no truly secure OS and that if people gave the same attention to finding security holes in MacOS they would find a comparable amount to how many are found in windows. Add in a poor attempt to give Microsoft some free marketing, and you end up with the nonsense quoted above.
George
February 6th, 2007