I've had analog, I've had digital. The difference is stark, and in the favor of digital. Digital has better overall sound characteristics, better cell hand-offs, digital data at better than 9600 baud (!!), and has the added benefit of consistent connection, be they good or bad ones (mostly good in my experience).
Lexmark, Xerox, the list goes on. How about a Linksys WRT54G? How many devices out there can be easily rooted and owned? The list is endless. Who would suspect a logon attempt or a slow port scan from a printer, or a volume-page scanner?
Maybe your VoIP system's very happy you linked it to your Active Directory with an administrative logon. Seen any weird LDAP requests recently? Had to reboot your RIP engine recently? Surprise!
Jags, Vettes, Lambos, 6.9s.... nice. The argument stands: a little 4-banger VTEC lasts a long time and costs far less from any perspective you look at it from, capex, opex, depreciation, etc. The downside is: eye appeal. Wait, we were talking about Vista, right?
I was waiting to see what might happen when Moore's Law met operating systems development curve problems. The different philosophies among Linux, MacOS, BSD, and even Solaris versus the once seemingly omnipotent Microsoft now seem to be much clearer.
GM reported a huge loss, and wants to waiver all of its workers. I wonder if we'll see an announcement coming in a decade or so from Redmond. Sorry to analogize cars with computers, but it seems apt in this case.
The 4-banger Honda engine would last longer, cost less to repair if it did break, and get you better mileage, and get you up to speed in normal traffic situations most of the time.
The day of the upgrade is waning, and for good reason: no real value, just a bit of eye candy and some cheap thrills..
IBM goofed when they released the XP motherboard with no copyright. It sparked a clone revolution.
DEC goofed with many things, like the DECMate with proprietary floppy formats.
AT&T made similar lock-ins. Then of course, AT&T was slaughtered in the BSD debacle. NCR was forced to find a niche. Compaq tried EISA and found what a silly move that was.
Apple waned when they locked-in hardware, then kind-of allowed their items to be 'cloned', but not really. Offering a PCI-bus and CardBus slots along with FireWire/I-Wire/IEEE 1394 was a start, but the rest of the guts were/are still difficult to deal with.
Then we could go into the mainframe/mini category, which were virtually all lock-ins. That's why they're not here anymore. What's onerous is the OEM relationships that Microsoft has with hardware vendors. Slowly, alternative choices have been made to in situ operating systems, and even a few refunds made to scrape Windows from new machines.
Along the way, it could get better, but the CE industry seems to support such crap-- viz the HDMI madness, and the bizarre interconnect of CE and cell/mobiles product groupings. Sigh.
You've been trapped by vendor lock-in. Your PDA and/or cellphone use proprietary skunkware to lock you in. You didn't think about caldav, or other synchronization APIs before you bought them, did you? If you want to replace Outlook, you have to break the whole chain, not just pieces of it. You could use MacOS, which is a bit open-sourcey (except those that must protect precious DRM bits).
Otherwise, break the chain. You can do it. Tell others how. Set yourself free.
You have twisted logic. Microsoft's been locking in OEMs and users for a dozen years now. Linux should therefore be past the stage of servers and ubiquitous on the desktop. But alas, it is not so. IBM, GEC, BAAN, SAP, SalesForce, and all of the major services vendors know that it's very difficult to do a wholesale/forklift upgrade of everything you have. Inertia is the first construct in vendor lock-in. I could take each of the aforementioned vendors apart, citing chapter and verse (I'm, sorry, litigant and docket) and drag their hallowed names through the mud.
I want to believe IBM and others, but they have a history of FUD themselves.
With rare exception, standards are bought and paid for. Look at who's on the IEEE committees..... the ITU.... it's not civilian engineers, it's sponsored lobbyists. Certainly, they don't always get their way, and there's a bit of democracy-- if that's what you want to call it. Vendor-neutrality is somewhat of an oxymoron.
Sun, IMHO, used to manipulate Ethernet by using non-standard frame gaps. Their traffic would get through before someone else's that respected a frame gap. SMTP is a horrible standard, and your mail box is full of the problem with it-- junk mail and spam. Those that 'improve' upon the standard with proprietary API sets (think Exchange) have won enormous market share. That's not because Exchange is bad, it's not horrible and it's a lock-in. Those that get the first turf often win, but not always so.
TCP/IP is a wonderful transport, and it has thousands of RFC patches, fixes, enhancements, and other twists. Yet basic services survive because it's 'open'. I have a jaundiced view; I have to deal with network design, transports, and the evils of operating systems (from A-Z) and I'll grant you that transparency and community help.
Restated, complain all you want. Lock-in continues, and it will continue until there's a more systematic approach to open business models rather than cult-based, fear-based purchasing-- and that attitude has to be reflected from stockholders and top management all the way to users. In the interim, expect vendors to be greedy. It's tough out there.
I saw this device recently, designed to be a be-all power supply for everything. It auto-senses voltage draw and feeds it. You have to get different connectors for different hardware, but it powers darn near anything from a USB widget to an Apple PowerBook (not sure about the weird connector for MacBook Pro). The idea is to give a road warrior freedom from carrying so many bricks. It's a wonderful idea, and it is doomed, sadly. Get a generic car, and you'll get a generic PC. Sorry to use automotive metaphor, but it's true. Building a better car, unfortunately, is not tied to how easily fixed it is, rather how fast it goes, and if I can fit it into my budget with the storage I need. Rarely do people think about green-ness, whether it can be fixed easily/inexpensively, has a long asset life, and other seemingly meaningful things. It seems only that it is in a desired color, and can dock an iPod. So it goes.
No one argues the downsides and superfluity of lock-ins. I like FOSS. But standards are used by those that bought and paid for them. Look at the history of Ethernet if you're not sure about that. Stallman was right about many things, and one of them was greed. Open is better, but don't expect the world to change overnight.
Just some things that are more onerous than others. This has been going on since the beginning of the industry, and it won't change. You can complain about it all you want, but it's going to continue to happen.
Everyone wants a revenue stream not a revenue pond.
That doesn't justify boorish behavior, but it explains how companies want to stay in existence, and few other models exist that allow them to do this. Once again, Bruce thinks we were born yesterday.
Unless you've only had a superficial examination of Vista (and also the code set that represents XP SP2 changes), you'll see that there's more to the $10B, and the $10B also covers Windows 2008 server editions, set to launch in less than 45 days. There's just more to it than you're representing, by an order of magnitude-- no matter whether the developments are of interest to you or not; they're there.
The DRM exercise prevents the content owners from due-diligence actions by shareholders, who have the nexus to look as capricious, actions that content owners take. DRM currently 'must' be there, or it looks like the asset values of the content are highly reduced. Imagine the shareholder frenzy then..... not to mention artists, which would question their deals and try and break out of their medieval contracts.
Wholesale piracy is a problem because the supply chains can't deal with it, and how to replace revenues and business models. DRM seems draconian, yet it's the only straw that can be grasped without collapse of numerous business models. How many 'record stores' and video shops have gone out of business in the past five years? In my area, hundreds of them. Few still survive, and sparing a few indie businesses, only the big box retailers sell hard media anymore.
Apple and Microsoft both have to placate the content intermediaries until these things realign-- as they can't continue in present form. But DRM also applies to corporate, organizational, and personal documents, content, and media as well.
I have a daughter that's totally aghast when she believes that I've visited her MySpace page. All of her secrets, and what her friends are doing there are posted, including boyfriend, party, and other social info. I'm not supposed to be a part of that world. Her naivete is really humorous. Could DRM help protect her? Maybe. Do we need DRM? In some ways, yes, it's part of personal/group privacy in that context.
Microsoft allowed millions to pirate their stuff for the same reason that Joe Camel gives away free cigarettes. It's habit forming, even if it's not good for you. They knew full well that they could tighten the grip at some point. They did, do, and reap the intended benefits of that. Once were once vices, as the saying goes, are now habits.
Consider the rumblings about the death of various vendor's (actually online distributors) of content. Consider also how DOCSIS 3 works in terms of content QoS.
Apple and Microsoft both have tried to meet consumer demands and are caught in the middle of the distribution/player chain. Open formats are winning, and F/OSS is by no means shutout. MP3s suck; FLAK and various OGGs are much better, but this is also a stratification in the market that parallels audiophile marketing (both the sane and the insane).
Demand is changing things; both Microsoft and Apple are bending to meet the perceived content owners' paranoia. You can walk around 1 Infinite Loop or Microsoft's campus and see the reality of content consumption. Then look on Mac notebooks for wonderful pieces of gear, just like you can on an HP or Dell, that thwart the living hell out of DRM. Why? People want their content; they're willing to pay.
Microsoft's initiatives are as empty and meaningless and obfuscating as Apple's. They're both pandering to the nervous nellies of the MPAA and RIAA and behind them, berserk management ostensibly protecting shareholder 'equity'. The trend towards DRM-free content is larger than either organizations internal initiatives.
Nah, we just use cellphone jammers to drop these damn flies; it worked great for Gordon Brown and that pesky 757 that flew overhead at Heathrow the other day.....
All of the valuations can be reduced to value. The product/code may have high value, but integration also has value. So does research into device compatibility, features, inherent reliability/stability, as well as use by civilians. The code is free. The implementation beyond that may come at a price.
But this is about the companies, and the added value they provide in a public/private context, too. MySQL has traction as one of the most popular open source projects going. It's strong but not unique in its profile; it's well supported and thoughtfully applied into a myriad of productive applications. The 'staff' is behind it. Sun will use it on many integration projects in a competitive stance with their perceived competitor, IBM, Oracle, and others. Oracle has purchased BEA for a lot of money. Oracle's going after applications, and with vigor. This pays off for them. More power to them.
If we're valuing open source 'companies' and organizations, then it's long term value that's for sale and purchase. The code will improve if the community and others stay with it. Valuations are necessarily a function of this long term return on investment.
Their current management fits their profile and run-rate. Attracting and incentivizing management takes time, as well as the ability to structure the organization for rapid growth. One more PBX company will need to battle with seventy+ PBX/keyswitch companies already in the marketplace. They're distracted by their hardware revenues, as this makes up a disproportionate amount of their current revenues. I'm hoping it's a phase they're going through or things might go badly for them despite the current quality (very good) of their stable branch of code. Their community relations people have a bit to learn, but herding cats isn't easy. Overall, we would agree.
A public company (think RedHat) trades for X times earnings. Buying RedHat would rationally need to have a return after debt service and 'thinning'. The software is free, but the services and integration and packaging that RedHat does is where the money is.
A private company like Digium, who does Asterisk, has a NIBT and may have additional potential for digital PBX widgets (look at their recent deal with 3Com for an example). They'd probably bring in 7 years run rate as a buy price.
Hyperic, while smaller, has great community development and might bring in more, because of a wider breadth of products touched. I'd value them at 10x annual run rate.
MySQL AB did a great job. Hurray for those guys; they deserve what they got. I hope that Sun can integrate MySQL well without butchering the company and product. Professional results can pay off.
I tend to side with what the courts have found. The problems remain about how long a copyright is good for, and if a modified work is a new work, and what are the mods and subsequent rights available to the modifier. It's all kind of nebulous and open to enriching lawyers, rather than consumers.
It's different to everyone. I suggest that fair use constitutes parody, abbreviated (less than half the content) in quotes, and where images or sounds are modified, upfront declaration that this has been done, no matter who the artist or the type of content is. Anything modified from its original should be declared, IMHO
User idiocy aside, the inherent architectural differences, not the sheer number of idiots IMHO, have made Windows a vulnerable target at many levels. In a perfect world, we would train people on using things before we let them loose with them. But we don't.
For this reason, until four years ago (Windows early XP era), Windows and its myriad faults were untenable. MacOS X, by contrast, at least warned people before they were about to get a knife stuck in their operating system. FireFox, Mozilla before it, Safari, IE, all of the browsers (sorry Opera, Ieft you out) have been vulnerable to one piece of malware or another. Microsoft's products (and I've been watching them from long before they went public) didn't button down their architecture. The registry has been eminently hackable in user space until XP SP2 locked it down.
Sure there are idiots out there. But that's why we have stop signs, yellow lines on the road, seat belts, and in some areas, vehicle inspections-- so that a common set of operating criteria can be used to insure safety of use.
The use of an open registry, easy access to system files, legacy exploitable executables, all of these cause(d) problems. If you expect civilians to uptake technology, then you have to ensure their safety, and Microsoft didn't do that, both in the quality of their code, and its basic architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had analog, I've had digital. The difference is stark, and in the favor of digital. Digital has better overall sound characteristics, better cell hand-offs, digital data at better than 9600 baud (!!), and has the added benefit of consistent connection, be they good or bad ones (mostly good in my experience).
Poorly maintained, bad coverage, iffy signal, rotten roaming (and occasional charges), it's ready to go.
Me too. Strip out everything but what you need, and beware the IPV6 mods.
Lexmark, Xerox, the list goes on. How about a Linksys WRT54G? How many devices out there can be easily rooted and owned? The list is endless. Who would suspect a logon attempt or a slow port scan from a printer, or a volume-page scanner?
Maybe your VoIP system's very happy you linked it to your Active Directory with an administrative logon. Seen any weird LDAP requests recently? Had to reboot your RIP engine recently? Surprise!
Diligence is its own reward.
Jags, Vettes, Lambos, 6.9s.... nice. The argument stands: a little 4-banger VTEC lasts a long time and costs far less from any perspective you look at it from, capex, opex, depreciation, etc. The downside is: eye appeal. Wait, we were talking about Vista, right?
I was waiting to see what might happen when Moore's Law met operating systems development curve problems. The different philosophies among Linux, MacOS, BSD, and even Solaris versus the once seemingly omnipotent Microsoft now seem to be much clearer.
GM reported a huge loss, and wants to waiver all of its workers. I wonder if we'll see an announcement coming in a decade or so from Redmond. Sorry to analogize cars with computers, but it seems apt in this case.
The 4-banger Honda engine would last longer, cost less to repair if it did break, and get you better mileage, and get you up to speed in normal traffic situations most of the time.
The day of the upgrade is waning, and for good reason: no real value, just a bit of eye candy and some cheap thrills..
Given your clarification, we would agree.
IBM goofed when they released the XP motherboard with no copyright. It sparked a clone revolution.
DEC goofed with many things, like the DECMate with proprietary floppy formats.
AT&T made similar lock-ins. Then of course, AT&T was slaughtered in the BSD debacle. NCR was forced to find a niche. Compaq tried EISA and found what a silly move that was.
Apple waned when they locked-in hardware, then kind-of allowed their items to be 'cloned', but not really. Offering a PCI-bus and CardBus slots along with FireWire/I-Wire/IEEE 1394 was a start, but the rest of the guts were/are still difficult to deal with.
Then we could go into the mainframe/mini category, which were virtually all lock-ins. That's why they're not here anymore. What's onerous is the OEM relationships that Microsoft has with hardware vendors. Slowly, alternative choices have been made to in situ operating systems, and even a few refunds made to scrape Windows from new machines.
Along the way, it could get better, but the CE industry seems to support such crap-- viz the HDMI madness, and the bizarre interconnect of CE and cell/mobiles product groupings. Sigh.
You've been trapped by vendor lock-in. Your PDA and/or cellphone use proprietary skunkware to lock you in. You didn't think about caldav, or other synchronization APIs before you bought them, did you? If you want to replace Outlook, you have to break the whole chain, not just pieces of it. You could use MacOS, which is a bit open-sourcey (except those that must protect precious DRM bits).
Otherwise, break the chain. You can do it. Tell others how. Set yourself free.
You have twisted logic. Microsoft's been locking in OEMs and users for a dozen years now. Linux should therefore be past the stage of servers and ubiquitous on the desktop. But alas, it is not so. IBM, GEC, BAAN, SAP, SalesForce, and all of the major services vendors know that it's very difficult to do a wholesale/forklift upgrade of everything you have. Inertia is the first construct in vendor lock-in. I could take each of the aforementioned vendors apart, citing chapter and verse (I'm, sorry, litigant and docket) and drag their hallowed names through the mud.
I want to believe IBM and others, but they have a history of FUD themselves.
With rare exception, standards are bought and paid for. Look at who's on the IEEE committees..... the ITU.... it's not civilian engineers, it's sponsored lobbyists. Certainly, they don't always get their way, and there's a bit of democracy-- if that's what you want to call it. Vendor-neutrality is somewhat of an oxymoron.
Sun, IMHO, used to manipulate Ethernet by using non-standard frame gaps. Their traffic would get through before someone else's that respected a frame gap. SMTP is a horrible standard, and your mail box is full of the problem with it-- junk mail and spam. Those that 'improve' upon the standard with proprietary API sets (think Exchange) have won enormous market share. That's not because Exchange is bad, it's not horrible and it's a lock-in. Those that get the first turf often win, but not always so.
TCP/IP is a wonderful transport, and it has thousands of RFC patches, fixes, enhancements, and other twists. Yet basic services survive because it's 'open'. I have a jaundiced view; I have to deal with network design, transports, and the evils of operating systems (from A-Z) and I'll grant you that transparency and community help.
Restated, complain all you want. Lock-in continues, and it will continue until there's a more systematic approach to open business models rather than cult-based, fear-based purchasing-- and that attitude has to be reflected from stockholders and top management all the way to users. In the interim, expect vendors to be greedy. It's tough out there.
I saw this device recently, designed to be a be-all power supply for everything. It auto-senses voltage draw and feeds it. You have to get different connectors for different hardware, but it powers darn near anything from a USB widget to an Apple PowerBook (not sure about the weird connector for MacBook Pro). The idea is to give a road warrior freedom from carrying so many bricks. It's a wonderful idea, and it is doomed, sadly. Get a generic car, and you'll get a generic PC. Sorry to use automotive metaphor, but it's true. Building a better car, unfortunately, is not tied to how easily fixed it is, rather how fast it goes, and if I can fit it into my budget with the storage I need. Rarely do people think about green-ness, whether it can be fixed easily/inexpensively, has a long asset life, and other seemingly meaningful things. It seems only that it is in a desired color, and can dock an iPod. So it goes.
No one argues the downsides and superfluity of lock-ins. I like FOSS. But standards are used by those that bought and paid for them. Look at the history of Ethernet if you're not sure about that. Stallman was right about many things, and one of them was greed. Open is better, but don't expect the world to change overnight.
Just some things that are more onerous than others. This has been going on since the beginning of the industry, and it won't change. You can complain about it all you want, but it's going to continue to happen.
Everyone wants a revenue stream not a revenue pond.
That doesn't justify boorish behavior, but it explains how companies want to stay in existence, and few other models exist that allow them to do this. Once again, Bruce thinks we were born yesterday.
Lots of users. Lots of places to hang signs and ads. Lots of groups. Lots of apps. Lots of little businesses.
Yahoo is a country with lots of geography. That's what Microsoft is buying.
It's not a new widget. It's not Web 2.0. It's not some sort of way-kewl social site with a new innovative bent.
It's the real estate. One more time: Microsoft is buying web real estate, not bottom feeding, not buying rotten tech.
Unless you've only had a superficial examination of Vista (and also the code set that represents XP SP2 changes), you'll see that there's more to the $10B, and the $10B also covers Windows 2008 server editions, set to launch in less than 45 days. There's just more to it than you're representing, by an order of magnitude-- no matter whether the developments are of interest to you or not; they're there.
The DRM exercise prevents the content owners from due-diligence actions by shareholders, who have the nexus to look as capricious, actions that content owners take. DRM currently 'must' be there, or it looks like the asset values of the content are highly reduced. Imagine the shareholder frenzy then..... not to mention artists, which would question their deals and try and break out of their medieval contracts.
Wholesale piracy is a problem because the supply chains can't deal with it, and how to replace revenues and business models. DRM seems draconian, yet it's the only straw that can be grasped without collapse of numerous business models. How many 'record stores' and video shops have gone out of business in the past five years? In my area, hundreds of them. Few still survive, and sparing a few indie businesses, only the big box retailers sell hard media anymore.
Apple and Microsoft both have to placate the content intermediaries until these things realign-- as they can't continue in present form. But DRM also applies to corporate, organizational, and personal documents, content, and media as well.
I have a daughter that's totally aghast when she believes that I've visited her MySpace page. All of her secrets, and what her friends are doing there are posted, including boyfriend, party, and other social info. I'm not supposed to be a part of that world. Her naivete is really humorous. Could DRM help protect her? Maybe. Do we need DRM? In some ways, yes, it's part of personal/group privacy in that context.
Microsoft allowed millions to pirate their stuff for the same reason that Joe Camel gives away free cigarettes. It's habit forming, even if it's not good for you. They knew full well that they could tighten the grip at some point. They did, do, and reap the intended benefits of that. Once were once vices, as the saying goes, are now habits.
Consider the rumblings about the death of various vendor's (actually online distributors) of content. Consider also how DOCSIS 3 works in terms of content QoS.
Apple and Microsoft both have tried to meet consumer demands and are caught in the middle of the distribution/player chain. Open formats are winning, and F/OSS is by no means shutout. MP3s suck; FLAK and various OGGs are much better, but this is also a stratification in the market that parallels audiophile marketing (both the sane and the insane).
Demand is changing things; both Microsoft and Apple are bending to meet the perceived content owners' paranoia. You can walk around 1 Infinite Loop or Microsoft's campus and see the reality of content consumption. Then look on Mac notebooks for wonderful pieces of gear, just like you can on an HP or Dell, that thwart the living hell out of DRM. Why? People want their content; they're willing to pay.
Microsoft's initiatives are as empty and meaningless and obfuscating as Apple's. They're both pandering to the nervous nellies of the MPAA and RIAA and behind them, berserk management ostensibly protecting shareholder 'equity'. The trend towards DRM-free content is larger than either organizations internal initiatives.
Nah, we just use cellphone jammers to drop these damn flies; it worked great for Gordon Brown and that pesky 757 that flew overhead at Heathrow the other day.....
All of the valuations can be reduced to value. The product/code may have high value, but integration also has value. So does research into device compatibility, features, inherent reliability/stability, as well as use by civilians. The code is free. The implementation beyond that may come at a price.
But this is about the companies, and the added value they provide in a public/private context, too. MySQL has traction as one of the most popular open source projects going. It's strong but not unique in its profile; it's well supported and thoughtfully applied into a myriad of productive applications. The 'staff' is behind it. Sun will use it on many integration projects in a competitive stance with their perceived competitor, IBM, Oracle, and others. Oracle has purchased BEA for a lot of money. Oracle's going after applications, and with vigor. This pays off for them. More power to them.
If we're valuing open source 'companies' and organizations, then it's long term value that's for sale and purchase. The code will improve if the community and others stay with it. Valuations are necessarily a function of this long term return on investment.
Their current management fits their profile and run-rate. Attracting and incentivizing management takes time, as well as the ability to structure the organization for rapid growth. One more PBX company will need to battle with seventy+ PBX/keyswitch companies already in the marketplace. They're distracted by their hardware revenues, as this makes up a disproportionate amount of their current revenues. I'm hoping it's a phase they're going through or things might go badly for them despite the current quality (very good) of their stable branch of code. Their community relations people have a bit to learn, but herding cats isn't easy. Overall, we would agree.
A public company (think RedHat) trades for X times earnings. Buying RedHat would rationally need to have a return after debt service and 'thinning'. The software is free, but the services and integration and packaging that RedHat does is where the money is.
A private company like Digium, who does Asterisk, has a NIBT and may have additional potential for digital PBX widgets (look at their recent deal with 3Com for an example). They'd probably bring in 7 years run rate as a buy price.
Hyperic, while smaller, has great community development and might bring in more, because of a wider breadth of products touched. I'd value them at 10x annual run rate.
MySQL AB did a great job. Hurray for those guys; they deserve what they got. I hope that Sun can integrate MySQL well without butchering the company and product. Professional results can pay off.
I tend to side with what the courts have found. The problems remain about how long a copyright is good for, and if a modified work is a new work, and what are the mods and subsequent rights available to the modifier. It's all kind of nebulous and open to enriching lawyers, rather than consumers.
It's different to everyone. I suggest that fair use constitutes parody, abbreviated (less than half the content) in quotes, and where images or sounds are modified, upfront declaration that this has been done, no matter who the artist or the type of content is. Anything modified from its original should be declared, IMHO
User idiocy aside, the inherent architectural differences, not the sheer number of idiots IMHO, have made Windows a vulnerable target at many levels. In a perfect world, we would train people on using things before we let them loose with them. But we don't.
For this reason, until four years ago (Windows early XP era), Windows and its myriad faults were untenable. MacOS X, by contrast, at least warned people before they were about to get a knife stuck in their operating system. FireFox, Mozilla before it, Safari, IE, all of the browsers (sorry Opera, Ieft you out) have been vulnerable to one piece of malware or another. Microsoft's products (and I've been watching them from long before they went public) didn't button down their architecture. The registry has been eminently hackable in user space until XP SP2 locked it down.
Sure there are idiots out there. But that's why we have stop signs, yellow lines on the road, seat belts, and in some areas, vehicle inspections-- so that a common set of operating criteria can be used to insure safety of use.
The use of an open registry, easy access to system files, legacy exploitable executables, all of these cause(d) problems. If you expect civilians to uptake technology, then you have to ensure their safety, and Microsoft didn't do that, both in the quality of their code, and its basic architecture.
Rather than exacerbate a flame war, I'll disclaim your belief. You're obviously an expert.