Microsoft 'Trustworthy Computing' Turns 10

gManZboy writes "Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and 'Anna Kournikova.' The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company's 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. 'TWC Next' will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says."

Re:Microsoft Succeeded

[DavidSell]

That might be so with the individual products, but there's another factors at play too. For example, for games DirectX has always been better than any other product. It has some minor competition from OpenGL and previously Glide, but they aren't even in the same ballpark and never have been. DirectX is complete package, technologically more advanced and has always had better documentation. It has always been better choice, both to developers and technologically.

This in turn made Windows really popular among gamers, even up to current day. It also did the groundwork for Microsoft to go for game consoles.

Similarly, Visual Studio and development tools have always been top-notch, and creating the huge software economy that Windows has. All of these things have helped Windows indirectly.

Microsoft is mostly interested in providing a platform, and they do it very well. Neither Linux or OS X go that extra mile.

Re:Microsoft Succeeded

[Sarten-X]

I know replying to myself is bad form, but after posting I looked up the stock growth for Microsoft and its competitors [google.com]. Over the past 10 years, Microsoft is more stagnant than Slashdot (the site, not Geeknet as a company).

using admin account is more secure

[todorb]

Windows users also weren't adjusted to having to work under non-admin account.

by using a non-admin account for the last couple of years i learned that the system is much less secure this way.

on windows the only program that could auto update was google chrome. firefox, flash, thunderbird, java, etc, all required manual update checks (which a non too computer savvy user, like my wife, won't do). firefox actually shows that there's an update available when chacking manually, but requires to be "run as administrator" to actually install it.

same problem for the mac. system update checks won't happen automatically in non-admin accounts.

eventually i got pissed of having to update everything manually and switched my accounts to admin.

Re:Microsoft Succeeded

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows users also weren't adjusted to having to work under non-admin account. That was the reason most people had issues with Vista, and by the time Windows 7 came out, application and hardware vendors had fixed their issues.

No. That is absolutely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The reason people hated Vista was because it simply would not run on less than 1GB of RAM. It was so unforgivably bloated and slow, that when people tried to use Vista as if it were a software upgrade that did not require a hardware upgrade, they immediately became enraged that they spent $100.00+ only to be told that they did not read the fine print, and that the System Requirements demand 1GB of RAM MINIMUM.

XP Era Home Desktops and Laptops could not run Vista, and to ordinary users who are absolutley terrified of swapping out RAM DIMMs, are actively prevented by vendors from swapping hardware, or were simply running laptops with buses for which RAM upgrades were tough to acquire (read: not sold at Best Buy), this meant buying a new PC in order to upgrade their software.

Re:Microsoft Succeeded

[haruchai]

John Smith? Around here we prefer to call him Anonymous Coward.