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Fears of a Conficker Meltdown Greatly Exaggerated
BobB-nw writes "Many have been worrying that the Conficker worm will somehow rise up and devastate the Internet on April 1. These fears are misplaced, security experts say. April 1 is what Conficker researchers are calling a trigger date, when the worm will switch the way it looks for software updates. A 60 Minutes episode about the worm on Sunday will stoke concerns. But the worm has already had several such trigger dates, including Jan. 1, none of which had any direct impact on IT operations, according to Phil Porras, a program director with SRI International who has studied the worm. 'Technically, we will see a new capability, but it complements a capability that already exists,' Porras said."
If everyone were using something else. Lets say linux or OSX Then whe worms would be tailored for those environments. As those environments are not in the majority, they are a poor choice for a botnet.
I can assure you that if Linux were to become the majority of the OS market, there would only be a small handful of different compile configs used for 99% of those computers
You mean having 10x users would reduce the number of different configurations? I don't know what you're smoking, but give me some.
Most likely every user would ask the nearest geek they can find, who would advocate their favorite.