An apropos blast from the past (Score 4, Informative)

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 5:22 PM
To: Microsoft and Subsidiaries: All FTE
Subject: Trustworthy computing

"Every few years I have sent out a memo talking about the highest priority for Microsoft. Two years ago, it was the kickoff of our .NET strategy. Before that, it was several memos about the importance of the Internet to our future and the ways we could make the Internet truly useful for people. Over the last year it has become clear that ensuring .NET is a platform for Trustworthy Computing is more important than any other part of our work. If we don't do this, people simply won't be willing -- or able -- to take advantage of all the other great work we do. Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing. We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing."

They are right to attribute such great importance to trustworthy systems -- and I do believe they are trying -- but 30,000,000 lines of code necessarily lead to opaque semantics. Good luck, MS, I think this will be one of many such deficiencies in Server 2003. Repeated claims of security and "trustworthiness" from their higher-ups will place the company in a boy-who-cried-wolf marketing scenario; at that point they're up a creek.