zelurxunil's Journal: YARMAB (Yet Another Reason Monopolies Are Bad)

We saw on a white-paper released by microsoft yesterday that they admitted to having security problems, while this is obviously a good thing they are at least admitting it, it is just another example of why monopolies hurt progress. Microsoft can quite honestly say whatever they want (within reason), and it not make a significant dent in their sales, because no one else is standing up and competing with them on an eye to eye level. Maybe they really are making "great strides" in security, maybe they're blowing smoke, the only people who really know are the hackers. Thats the scary poing to me, that Microsoft would admit, that for a while (even if its not the case now) their source code was insecure, in other words it was only available to the black hats, yet tommorow there won't be a rush to the store...microsoft will still dominate as leading OS in server and desktop products. There won't really even be an uproar, linux zealots will say see I told you so again, mac zealots will laugh and maybe come up with some new PC joke, maybe some Unix Sysadmins will read it and be slightly less likely to change to windows in the near future, few consumers will ever see it but those who do will kind of skim through it and go on deleting it as if it where spam. But in the end it doesn't really matter, Microsoft is a monopoly, they don't have to put out a better product, or a more secure one, they just have to keep up some PR, and continue to feed crap down the lines of millions of people. Just status-quo for the IT world I guess.