Opinion: It’s the security, stupid

But the way Vista was handled by the software giant, borders on the criminal and somebody surely must pay, and the tech media must surely share a slice of that punishment.

Despite the endless bleating by oodles of analysts, faithfully reported by legions of journalists, about the woeful security in Windows XP and the terrible patch upon patch upon patch being slapped over the gaping holes, barely a word about Vista’s seriously enhanced security surfaced.

All that was ever raised was “this driver is busted” or “my graphics card is too slow” or even “there’s a 64-bit version? Who says?”

Hardly any writers waxed lyrical about the ground-up re-write of Vista to finally make the desktop secure.

Conversely, the commentariat almost universally ceased bleating about the lack of security in WinXP, almost immediately after they found a better headline grabber – Vista isn’t selling well.

It’s as though the entire tech media was on the payroll of the hackers and crackers, doing their level best to make sure nobody adopted the much harder to compromise Vista.

But you can’t blame the media entirely – Microsoft is a big wealthy company and they can afford plenty of PR without waiting around to buy beers for a few sympathetic journos.

No, the Redmond Rottweiler could have run it’s own campaign around security except for one tiny little detail getting in the way.

It would have required them to admit that WinXP security sucked. They know it does, we know it does, and we used to say it does, but Microsoft itself seemed to be so worried about negative publicity for the old dog that they weren’t prepared to spruik the lack of fleas on the brand new dog.

And so, now we have to wait for Windows 7. Woof, woof.