Security Community Reacts to Microsoft Announcement

A number of readers have collected stories concerning the change of focus by Bill Gates to security. Bruce Schneier and Adam Shostack have written a piece, while Crag Mundie of MSFT has also chimed in, along with some commentary from ZD folks. SecurityFocus has other words, as does InfoWarrior.

Comments

Not security: trust - in "established" companies

[pointym5]

Reading Mundie's article made it crystal clear what all of this Microsoft security stuff is about. It has nothing to do with increasing security of their products, per se. It's all about engineering a market perception that Microsoft is a single entity that has the ability to make announcements like this, to offer commitments (empty or not), and be a focus of trust. Read the article -- note the implications that in order to have trust in software, you need some corporate entity in which to place your trust.

Guess what competition will be easy for their marketing machine to paint as being lacking in the trustable big established multi-billion-dollar company department? Sure there's IBM, but experience suggests that Microsoft are fully up to the challenge of out-marketing IBM.