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Microsoft's Most Successful Failure

Posted by Zonk on from the win-some-lose-some dept.

m4dm4n writes "As we near the end of mainstream support of Win2k The Register looks back at what it has achieved. What was meant to be Microsoft's most secure OS ever turned into a disaster. Worm after worm changed the face of internet security in Win2k's first 2 years. Five years down the line the battle is far from won, but the improvements are dramatic." From the article: "Things were different in the year 2000. Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal. We made it past January 1st, and then it was time to move on. Windows 2000 came out that first quarter, just as security was becoming more interesting to more people -- and Windows was a good place to start. It was also seemed to be the start of a new breed of Windows hackers."

6 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Learning Experience by strongmace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If only I could make as much money from my mistakes as Microsoft does from its learning experiences.

    --
    "If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
    1. Re:Learning Experience by toddestan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Many people did not *want* to upgrade to Windows 2000, but had little choice due to the lack of other options.

      Windows 2000 is one of the rare times in the Microsoft world when you actually want to upgrade due to it actually being a clearly superior product than its predecessors. There is no question that Windows 2000 is a better OS than any of the Dos-based ones. It's also more stable and easier to install than NT4, and has better driver support, plus it adds some of the nice touches introduced with Windows 98. This is completely unlike the Windows 2000->XP "upgrade", or the essentially identical last 4 versions of Office.

  2. Re:say what you want... by KoReE · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's because of Star Wars. Everyone wants a guy with a red lightsaber, and a guy with a blue lightsaber. Gates has been handed the red one, and Linus the blue one. It's really quite dumb.

    I'm a big fan of the "best tool for the job". I like Windows for a desktop, Linux for a server environment...but Windows server environment is improving. I still think it sucks, but it's improving....

    --
    Instant Karma's gonna get you...
  3. Oh for one last time..... by Boss,+Pointy+Haired · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal.

    It was a big deal. Lot's of us here worked very hard to make sure that nothing bad happened and this really gets to me when people throw around the opinion that it was all a fuss over nothing.

    Get a clue.

    1. Re:Oh for one last time..... by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Absolutely, and it's all an after effect of the way it was presented in the media.

      It's kinda like there's a big office building on fire downtown. The news reporter is standing in front of the blaze, speaking in a calm voice layed thinly over barely-contained hysterics: "As you can see behind me, the fire continues to burn! If left unchecked, this fire could spread to nearby buildings, and from there continue to spread, until eventually the entire metropolitan area is burned to the ground. From there, who knows how far it could spread! Civilization itself hangs in the balance! Flee, flee for your lives! And buy duct tape!" Meanwhile, fire fighters work like hell to put out the fire, and it eventually dies. The next day everyone is wondering what the hell the big deal was and what they are going to do with all the duct tape they bought. Feeling gullible and duped, they forget that there really could have been a disaster if the fire fighters had just sat on their thumbs watching the building burn...

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  4. "More innocent times" .. yeah right by dustmite · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Article is pure MS propaganda.

    - They're trying to divert attention away from all the security problems that XP has had. XP is BY FAR the "biggest disaster" of any OS in the history of humankind when it comes to security. Something like 25% of XP boxes are still to this day infected zombie machines. Typical time-to-infection of any pre-SP2 XP system hooked up to the Net was something in the order of seconds or minutes. But wait, let's rewrite history by claiming that 2K was far worse, so that people think don't XP was so bad in retrospect, and that people think MS were already improving their security between 2K and XP.

    - They're trying to pretend, yet again, that 2K and XP were written in "more innocent times" when "security problems" were unknown - so that the public is tricked into thinking that their shocking neglect of security was somehow excusable. Spin, spin, spin. All of today's security problems were very well-known by any IT professional even by the 80's; even Java in the 90's touted security over and over as one of its major selling points, and when started pushing their ActiveX-based "trust" model in response ('hey, we have an object model, let's just pretend it's secure and market it heavily') anyone who knew anything was already warning that that was going to be a disaster.

    Microsoft knew that security was going to get this bad, but they ignored it in favour of pushing for better time to market to be ready for upgrade cycles and attrition sales.