Microsoft’s COO Says Vista SP2 “Most Secure OS On The Planet”…. Really, He Did Say That

You know that this is going to end badly. As if to invite trouble, Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner decided to open his mouth at the MidMarket CIO Summit last week:

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7, but certainly when we broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

Great job Mr. Turner. You’ve just invited every 1337 h4x0r on planet earth to prove you wrong. Which you know they will. Do not be shocked my friends if Mr. Turner is found dead in a ditch due to chair induced trauma in the near future, or at the very least made to eat those words.

The “my OS is better than your OS” debate is usually pointless due to the fact that the fanbois on each side of the debate will stop any rational discussion from taking place. But let’s go once more unto the breach shall we? When Mr. Turner says that his OS is more secure than Mac OS X or Linux, he’s smoking some serious drugs. All my Windows machines are beefed up with  firewalls and antivirus applications to keep them safe, on top of regular patching (which you should do with ANY OS and not just with Windows). Other than running software update once in a while to patch the OS, I’m completely happy to leave the Mac without virus protection at all and the built in firewall isn’t even turned on. Trust me, I sleep soundly. My LINUX box hasn’t been touched in months and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to get pwned anytime soon for the same reason as my Mac. Which is that there isn’t any need to beef it up from where I stand. Then there’s the fact that more 1337 h4x0r types target Windows boxes because it’s the dominant OS out there. Of course, that’s not to say that LINUX and OS X can’t be hacked. ANYTHING can be hacked. It’s just more likely to be a Microsoft box that gets pwned at the moment.

For his sake, I hope that when Mr. Turner says “Most Secure OS On The Planet,” he means by Microsoft standards. Then in that case, it would actually be an improvement.

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