Office has had about the same interface since its inception, yet Microsoft took a big risk and completely changed it for Office 2007.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It's hard to argue that the new Ribbon interface isn't better than the old menu-based hunt-for-your-feature interface.
In many ways, the same goes for Windows. While it certainly has fewer menu options, moving away from menus in all their applications has been a fundemental design principal for the past two or three years. (Since they started work on Office 2007.)
So while there might be "one right way" to do things, who is to say that the way we have been doing things for years is that one right way? They improved Office dramatically, and now they're setting their sights on Windows.
Vista's Aero interface was mostly about eye candy (although there were some very important substantive changes, like inline search, breadcrumb trails, auto-scroll views, etc.), and Window Seven will build on this to bring Ribbons to the masses.
Wait, so Vista is a failure because you have no interest in it?
Isn't it possible that you don't really know much about Vista, and that you get most of your news from extremely biased sites like Slashdot, and therefore haven't been able to come to an educated conclusion about the product?
Wow. That was an absolutely quintessential ignorant slashdot post. I'm gonna bookmark this one for future reference.
Unfortunately, since my "upgrade" to Vista, the pace at which I get that stuff done is noticeably slower. Why? Is it that your PC is slower, or is it that you can't perform the same actions you used to as fast as you used to because of UI changes. If so, what are those UI changes that are causing you the most problems?
I've already disabled UAC Why?
don't use Aero Why? For performance reasons? Fair enough, although a Dx9 video card with 128MB of ram runs turned off the sidebar Understandable. The sidebar is almost useless right now. Most of the gadgets suck. It has potential, but it's not there yet.
As far as I'm concerned the "improvements" Vista have brought are completely superfluous to the computing experience Well, the only things you've mentioned are the visible changes to Vista. There are TONS of changes under the hood, as well as UI changes that are more subtle, that are of enormous benefit. Go read that wikipedia article I linked to in my first post.
that and the fact that it runs like a dog even on the hardware I'm using which is little over a year old convince me that Vista is a major flop, despite what sales numbers might say. I run Vista on all my machines. I have an IBM t42P which is over 3 years old. (1.8Ghz, 2GB of RAM, 5200RPM disk, 128MB dx9 graphics card). Runs about the same as XP, if not a bit more responsive. The perf score for the machine is 3.8. My desktop, which is over 2 years old, gets a 4.9 and runs Vista extremely well.
Most studies show that Vista is about the same as XP perf wise when tested via benchmarks, and overall "feels" more responsive than XP. The key here, I think, is RAM. Vista is very aggressive at caching things it thinks you'll need, and because of this it can take much better advantage of RAM. 1GB is a minimum, 2GB seems to be a sweet spot. Considering a 1GB DIMM costs about $70, it's not that bad an upgrade.
First, I don't see how my comments are in anyway "fear, uncertainty, or doubt".
I suspect that 'most everyone ragging on Vista also recognizes that a high percentage of PCs will be running Vista in a couple of years by shear inertia of Vista coming installed on replacement PCs People choose to buy those PCs. There are MANY places, include most major OEMs these days, that sell PCs without Vista. Dell being a great example. People CHOOSE the PC with Vista. If Vista sucked as bad as people are claiming, people would be stick with XP in much larger numbers, or switching to Linux or the Mac.
You can't write off every sale of Vista to people not knowing any better or not having a choice.
Of course Microsoft is going to bill Vista as a "revolutionary advance". They did the same with XP. Not sure how this affects whether or not Vista was a "success". From a business perspective, it's about sales. From a technical perspective, it's more complicated... and, in my opinion (which I am happy to defend if you have specific technical points against Vista), it is a success here as well.
I still refuse to use an OS that will cripple or remove my ability to view HD content, or that will require an expensive license from Microsoft to allow me to build any drivers for the 64bit version, or that, if you turn off the non-security "feature" of UAC suddenly disallows programs to write to the TEMP folder First, Vista doesn't prevent you from viewing HD content. I don't have any "trusted" media path hardware (like HDMI), yet I can view HD content just fine.
Second, you can develop 64bit drivers all you want. Vista, by default, will only load signed 64bit drivers. You can either obtain a signing cert from a company like Verisign (for about $400), or you can TURN OFF THAT RESTRICTION. Wow, is that so hard?
Lastly, I have no idea what you're talking about regarding UAC. If you turn it *off* it disallows admin's the right to write to the temp folder? What temp folder? In your profile? Is it a permissions issue?
At the very least, Microsoft should have realized that, with most people acclimated to XP over the last 6-7 years, totally changing the look and feel of everything was a bad idea. (No, I don't want to customize the damn desktop, I want access to its properties!!!) So change it back. If you don't like the new GUI, change it to the old GUI. Are you honestly claiming that Vista, as a whole, is a "steaming pile" because they changed the very ambiguous (albeit familiar) term "properties" to the much more description "Customize"? Wow.
If you think Dell was simply responding to FUD when it decided to sell XP boxes again, you're deluding yourself. A big company like Dell has access to all kinds of data upon which to base a decision like that, and the business knowledge to know what will be profitable. Really? Because in public statements Dell said that they had received "communications" from "customers" that said they wanted XP as an option. They explicitly stated that this was the reason they continued to offer it on low end machines. So, are they lying, or are you full of shit?
While the FUD machine has done an admiral job at making Vista seem like a steaming pile, that's all it has been: FUD.
I've been using Vista since November of 2006, essentially days after it was released to MSDN, and it is without a doubt better than XP. The improvements are both obvious and subtle. I'm not going to list them all here, because others have done a good job already.
So if Vista is superior to XP technically, which was deemed by most as a great success, then Vista being a failure must be attributed to sales data. Many early reports showed Vista having poor sales, but those reports were flawed due to the fact that they compared the launch of Vista to the launch of XP. Vista launched Jan. 29th, long after the holiday season was over, where as XP enjoyed the entire holiday season to boosts its sales.
Once this was corrected, reports showed that Vista was selling on pace with XP. Indeed, as of March 2007, Vista's sales were double that of XPs.
In addition, despite being released to consumers and businesses separately, Vista's sales were only 4% behind XP, which was released to both simultaneously. In other words, Vista beat expectations by a long shot.
So it must be that sales of Vista have stagnated since March... opps, that's not true either. Apparently, Vista sold so well that it offset the massive hit Microsoft took as part of extending the Xbox 360 warranty to 3 years.
And then there is the wonderful story that Vista has somehow boosted XP sales, which is completely silly. It didn't boost XP sales. There was a larger proportion of XP sales than were expected, but the breakdown is about 80% Vista, 20% XP. Part of this is thanks to the FUD machine (good job guys) prompting some large OEMs, like Dell, to offer XP on lower end machines. Microsoft underestimated the FUD machine's ability to influence the market. (By the way, there were 7% more XP sales than were expected. Hardly a tidal wave of XP purchases.)
Sorry guys. I know you desperately want to believe that Vista is a failure, both technically and in terms of sales. But you're wrong on both accounts. 2 years from now, when 90% of PCs are running Vista, you'll probably still claim it's a failure, although you'll fall back to the technical side of things.
I'll be sure to bookmark my post and repeatedly link to it in all those flame wars.
I read the article pretty carefully. I don't see any actual numbers to back up this "debunking".
If you're going to bash Microsoft for using fuzzy math, at least have the courtesy of supplying some of your own.
Also, can somebody explain the issues with Teredo? Sorry, but simply declaring that there are lots of bugs in Microsoft's new TCP/IP implementation with absolutely no evidence to back this up doesn't help your argument.
Most analogies do indeed suck... especially ones that compare something as incredibly complex as a modern operating system to something as relatively trivial as a house.
According to that ZDNet article, Microsoft did exactly what I described. They didn't release the details of the bug until they released the patch. But they did described those bugs in the bulletin for the patch release. In other words, they weren't secret, and they would be counted in the bug analysis.
Is it possible that Microsoft completely conceals bug fixes and never announces them, even after they are fixed? Sure. But there is no evidence of that.
As you said, it's true that it would be harder for open source to get away with this, but it's still possible. But I wouldn't claim it's happening unless I had evidence.
As a side note, I agree that Microsoft shouldn't only detail their bugs in their patch release bulletins. They should give basic summary information ahead of time. Not enough to give the baddies a chance to write exploits, but enough to let admins try and put protective measures in place to stop said baddies.
You sir should think before you post. You might want to follow your own advice.
You're committing a logical fallacy in your post. You equate the fact that your Macs have never been compromised (that you know of) to the their actual security. This is an invalid equation.
I could write a piece of software that had a 1000 known critical security vulnerabilities, but it might never get hacked. Does that then mean that my software is secure? Of course not.
Factors that contribute to whether or not something gets compromised include the number of vulnerabilities in the code, but it's not limited to just that. Usage is a big factor. In the cause of my buggy piece of software, if I'm the only one who uses it, it's unlikely to be a target.
Similarly, Mac OS X is used by far fewer people than XP. And, as of April, Vista was used by about 50% as many people as use Mac OS X. Change are, Vista is now used by more people than Mac OS X. So a direct comparison is now at least more valid.
Macs have had far more known vulnerabilities than Vista, and even than XP in recent years. That's an objective fact. A fact that can't be changed by how much Steve Jobs coolaid you drink.
Microsoft has acknowledged that they include secret undocumented patches in hotfixes, patches that would count against their "score" if they were required to count them... open source software doesn't have the luxury of hiding their dirty laundry like that. While I've certainly heard of Microsoft not disclosing the vulnerabilities until their patches are released, I've never heard of them patching things completely in secret. Do you have any citations to back that up?
And it's not just Linux that suffers from that "disadvantage", OS X has an awful lot of open-source components, and many of Apple's updates have been patches rolled in from them. It's interesting that you attack Microsoft for secrecy but say nothing about Apple, which is famous for its hostile attitude towards people who discover exploits as well as their secrecy about their patches are what they fix.
Microsoft's gaming the system here. Statements like this should be granted no credibility. Well, based on the evidence, the statement is true. Compare the vulnerabilities yourself. Find flaws in their reasoning. Poke holes in their report.
Then... I just wonder. Why virtually no linux distro is using things like SPs and still virtually all of them remain much more secure and stable than any Windows version ever was?... I wonder what you're basing that conclusion on since the data that is readily apparent seems to suggest otherwise.
And I think you'll see that thanks to my new and improved door lock, the fact that I leave my windows unlatched is not a critical security issue. What a completely nonsensical and inaccurate comparison. Microsoft's Secure Development Lifecycle has almost certainly dramatically improved the quality of their code. This report, plus 3rd party counts of vulnerabilities, support this conclusion.
But no matter how good your code is, things will be missed. That's the point of having things like Address Space Layout Randomization, IE 7 Protected Mode, Session 0 Isolation, and the dozens of other security layers that Microsoft added to Vista.
Furthermore, being rated non-critical can often mean that it requires significant user action (like turning off multiple security features) in order to make a user vulnerable.
What's next, are you going to blame Microsoft when a user smacks their motherboard with a hammer?
The fact of the matter is, that at least so far, Vista is proving to be the most secure OS on the market. (Aside from perhaps OpenBSD, of course.:) If you have data that suggests otherwise, then provide it.
Microsoft quickly patched all of the critical vulnerabilities in Vista. Those vulnerabilities that are not rated critical, which comprise 100% of the unpatched vulnerabilities mentioned in the article, are simply not very likely to cause issues for people.
Microsoft often waits to patch these kinds of vulnerabilities until they've taken care of more important things, like critical bugs, and sometimes chooses to roll them up into a service pack. This allows for more thorough testing and decreases the chance that the minor fix causes a major regression issue.
Despite what people think, Microsoft doesn't have unlimited resources.
If you RTFA, you'll see that Vista's unpatched vulnerabilities are not considered "critical" because, thanks to Vista's improved security model, are virtually impossible to exploit.
Slashdot actually managed to spin a highly positive analysis of Vista into something that suggests Vista is not only worse than XP, but Microsoft is somehow going out of its way *not* to fix it.
Gotta love it. Slashdot is the GOP of technology news sites.
A more fair comparison would be to compare two versions that were released at around the same time and have about the same overall usage.
I'm not sure there is quite a perfect match in this respect between IIS and Apache.
That said, it's hard to deny that Microsoft has completely turned around on security, at least with respects to some of their newer products. IIS 6, ISA Server, and Vista have all (at least so far) shown to be far more resilient to attacks than anything Microsoft has done before.
I'm not sure comparing IIS 6 to Apache 2.2 is particularly fair. Apache 2.2 was released in December of 2005. IIS 6 was released in March of 2003. It has had about 2 more years for people to attack it and find bugs.
First, there is not nearly enough information provided by Google to come to any real conclusions.
It could be that IIS is more likely to become infected than Apache and then be used to distribute malware, or it could be that malware purveyors are more likely to host their malware on IIS. Or it could be a combination of both.
They also fail to mention what versions of IIS we're talking about, as that makes a huge difference. IIS 5.x had more holes than a cubic mile of swiss cheese. IIS 6, on the other hand, appears to be rock solid and actually has fewer vulnerabilities than Apache.
Second, the fact that Google is a direct competitor to Microsoft is an obvious reason to find their conclusions dubious, at best. They have plenty of reasons to bash Microsoft at every possible opportunity.
The fact remains, IIS 6 has never had a remotely exploitable hole. Period. And it has been on the market for over 4 years.
Microsoft learned from their mistakes and are making their software secure, not just by Microsoft standards, but clearly by any standard.
You can talk about old versions of software all you want, but it's just an attempt to deflect from the fact that your comment about "Bagdad Bob" would be more accurately assigned to people like you, not Microsoft.
There are many, many things you can criticize IE for... but being bloated doesn't really seem like one of them. If you RTFA, they compare the growing bloat not with IE, but with Mozilla.
True, 3rd party add-ons for IE can bring it to a crawl, but that's not IE's fault. The same problem exists in any browser that supports extensibility via a plugin model.
I use Firefox on XP because it's safer than IE, certainly not because it's less bloated. Firefox consistently uses far more ram (I have several screen shots of Firefox using 1.5GB+ of ram with *no* plugins enabled and just one tab open), dies a painful death due to poor integration with things like Flash (100% CPU Flash advertisements, anyone?), or simply just crashes.
On Vista I use IE 7 w/Protected Mode. Why? Well, again, because it's safer. But it also has the benefit of returning me to the days when a browser didn't use 2x the RAM of Photoshop. Imagine that.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you not apply the same logic to Office?
Office has had about the same interface since its inception, yet Microsoft took a big risk and completely changed it for Office 2007.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It's hard to argue that the new Ribbon interface isn't better than the old menu-based hunt-for-your-feature interface.
In many ways, the same goes for Windows. While it certainly has fewer menu options, moving away from menus in all their applications has been a fundemental design principal for the past two or three years. (Since they started work on Office 2007.)
So while there might be "one right way" to do things, who is to say that the way we have been doing things for years is that one right way? They improved Office dramatically, and now they're setting their sights on Windows.
Vista's Aero interface was mostly about eye candy (although there were some very important substantive changes, like inline search, breadcrumb trails, auto-scroll views, etc.), and Window Seven will build on this to bring Ribbons to the masses.
I reply primarily about Microsoft articles because there are very few defenders of the company on Slashdot. (At least educated defenders.)
People rip and bash Microsoft and don't expect a fight. It's like a GOP convention when somebody brings up Clinton.
In addition, I try to only comment on stories when I think I can contribute something that hasn't already been said.
I can list lots of things I don't like about Microsoft and its products... but that's already been done in great length on Slashdot.
Wait, so Vista is a failure because you have no interest in it?
Isn't it possible that you don't really know much about Vista, and that you get most of your news from extremely biased sites like Slashdot, and therefore haven't been able to come to an educated conclusion about the product?
Wow. That was an absolutely quintessential ignorant slashdot post. I'm gonna bookmark this one for future reference.
Most studies show that Vista is about the same as XP perf wise when tested via benchmarks, and overall "feels" more responsive than XP. The key here, I think, is RAM. Vista is very aggressive at caching things it thinks you'll need, and because of this it can take much better advantage of RAM. 1GB is a minimum, 2GB seems to be a sweet spot. Considering a 1GB DIMM costs about $70, it's not that bad an upgrade.
Can you describe your machine's stats?
First, I don't see how my comments are in anyway "fear, uncertainty, or doubt". I suspect that 'most everyone ragging on Vista also recognizes that a high percentage of PCs will be running Vista in a couple of years by shear inertia of Vista coming installed on replacement PCs People choose to buy those PCs. There are MANY places, include most major OEMs these days, that sell PCs without Vista. Dell being a great example. People CHOOSE the PC with Vista. If Vista sucked as bad as people are claiming, people would be stick with XP in much larger numbers, or switching to Linux or the Mac.
You can't write off every sale of Vista to people not knowing any better or not having a choice.
Of course Microsoft is going to bill Vista as a "revolutionary advance". They did the same with XP. Not sure how this affects whether or not Vista was a "success". From a business perspective, it's about sales. From a technical perspective, it's more complicated... and, in my opinion (which I am happy to defend if you have specific technical points against Vista), it is a success here as well.
Second, you can develop 64bit drivers all you want. Vista, by default, will only load signed 64bit drivers. You can either obtain a signing cert from a company like Verisign (for about $400), or you can TURN OFF THAT RESTRICTION. Wow, is that so hard?
Lastly, I have no idea what you're talking about regarding UAC. If you turn it *off* it disallows admin's the right to write to the temp folder? What temp folder? In your profile? Is it a permissions issue? At the very least, Microsoft should have realized that, with most people acclimated to XP over the last 6-7 years, totally changing the look and feel of everything was a bad idea. (No, I don't want to customize the damn desktop, I want access to its properties!!!) So change it back. If you don't like the new GUI, change it to the old GUI. Are you honestly claiming that Vista, as a whole, is a "steaming pile" because they changed the very ambiguous (albeit familiar) term "properties" to the much more description "Customize"? Wow. If you think Dell was simply responding to FUD when it decided to sell XP boxes again, you're deluding yourself. A big company like Dell has access to all kinds of data upon which to base a decision like that, and the business knowledge to know what will be profitable. Really? Because in public statements Dell said that they had received "communications" from "customers" that said they wanted XP as an option. They explicitly stated that this was the reason they continued to offer it on low end machines. So, are they lying, or are you full of shit?
While the FUD machine has done an admiral job at making Vista seem like a steaming pile, that's all it has been: FUD.
I've been using Vista since November of 2006, essentially days after it was released to MSDN, and it is without a doubt better than XP. The improvements are both obvious and subtle. I'm not going to list them all here, because others have done a good job already.
So if Vista is superior to XP technically, which was deemed by most as a great success, then Vista being a failure must be attributed to sales data. Many early reports showed Vista having poor sales, but those reports were flawed due to the fact that they compared the launch of Vista to the launch of XP. Vista launched Jan. 29th, long after the holiday season was over, where as XP enjoyed the entire holiday season to boosts its sales.
Once this was corrected, reports showed that Vista was selling on pace with XP. Indeed, as of March 2007, Vista's sales were double that of XPs.
In addition, despite being released to consumers and businesses separately, Vista's sales were only 4% behind XP, which was released to both simultaneously. In other words, Vista beat expectations by a long shot.
So it must be that sales of Vista have stagnated since March... opps, that's not true either. Apparently, Vista sold so well that it offset the massive hit Microsoft took as part of extending the Xbox 360 warranty to 3 years.
And then there is the wonderful story that Vista has somehow boosted XP sales, which is completely silly. It didn't boost XP sales. There was a larger proportion of XP sales than were expected, but the breakdown is about 80% Vista, 20% XP. Part of this is thanks to the FUD machine (good job guys) prompting some large OEMs, like Dell, to offer XP on lower end machines. Microsoft underestimated the FUD machine's ability to influence the market. (By the way, there were 7% more XP sales than were expected. Hardly a tidal wave of XP purchases.)
Sorry guys. I know you desperately want to believe that Vista is a failure, both technically and in terms of sales. But you're wrong on both accounts. 2 years from now, when 90% of PCs are running Vista, you'll probably still claim it's a failure, although you'll fall back to the technical side of things.
I'll be sure to bookmark my post and repeatedly link to it in all those flame wars.
While I think the punishment is a bit excessive (jail time is ridiculous), there is a very simple way to resolve this situation.
Don't bring a camera into a movie theater and try to tape the movie, dumbass.
I read the article pretty carefully. I don't see any actual numbers to back up this "debunking".
If you're going to bash Microsoft for using fuzzy math, at least have the courtesy of supplying some of your own.
Also, can somebody explain the issues with Teredo? Sorry, but simply declaring that there are lots of bugs in Microsoft's new TCP/IP implementation with absolutely no evidence to back this up doesn't help your argument.
Ah, yes. You are correct. I misread the article.
I'd be interested to know how often this happens.
Most analogies do indeed suck... especially ones that compare something as incredibly complex as a modern operating system to something as relatively trivial as a house.
According to that ZDNet article, Microsoft did exactly what I described. They didn't release the details of the bug until they released the patch. But they did described those bugs in the bulletin for the patch release. In other words, they weren't secret, and they would be counted in the bug analysis.
Is it possible that Microsoft completely conceals bug fixes and never announces them, even after they are fixed? Sure. But there is no evidence of that.
As you said, it's true that it would be harder for open source to get away with this, but it's still possible. But I wouldn't claim it's happening unless I had evidence.
As a side note, I agree that Microsoft shouldn't only detail their bugs in their patch release bulletins. They should give basic summary information ahead of time. Not enough to give the baddies a chance to write exploits, but enough to let admins try and put protective measures in place to stop said baddies.
You're committing a logical fallacy in your post. You equate the fact that your Macs have never been compromised (that you know of) to the their actual security. This is an invalid equation.
I could write a piece of software that had a 1000 known critical security vulnerabilities, but it might never get hacked. Does that then mean that my software is secure? Of course not.
Factors that contribute to whether or not something gets compromised include the number of vulnerabilities in the code, but it's not limited to just that. Usage is a big factor. In the cause of my buggy piece of software, if I'm the only one who uses it, it's unlikely to be a target.
Similarly, Mac OS X is used by far fewer people than XP. And, as of April, Vista was used by about 50% as many people as use Mac OS X. Change are, Vista is now used by more people than Mac OS X. So a direct comparison is now at least more valid.
Macs have had far more known vulnerabilities than Vista, and even than XP in recent years. That's an objective fact. A fact that can't be changed by how much Steve Jobs coolaid you drink.
But no matter how good your code is, things will be missed. That's the point of having things like Address Space Layout Randomization, IE 7 Protected Mode, Session 0 Isolation, and the dozens of other security layers that Microsoft added to Vista.
Furthermore, being rated non-critical can often mean that it requires significant user action (like turning off multiple security features) in order to make a user vulnerable.
What's next, are you going to blame Microsoft when a user smacks their motherboard with a hammer?
The fact of the matter is, that at least so far, Vista is proving to be the most secure OS on the market. (Aside from perhaps OpenBSD, of course.
Otherwise, keep your silly analogies to yourself.
Then read the actual report: http://www.csoonline.com/pdf/6_Month_Vista_Vuln_Re port.pdf
It sounds bad because the person who posted it to Slashdot, and Slashdot's editors, want it to sounds bad. Are you new here or something?
Microsoft quickly patched all of the critical vulnerabilities in Vista. Those vulnerabilities that are not rated critical, which comprise 100% of the unpatched vulnerabilities mentioned in the article, are simply not very likely to cause issues for people.
Microsoft often waits to patch these kinds of vulnerabilities until they've taken care of more important things, like critical bugs, and sometimes chooses to roll them up into a service pack. This allows for more thorough testing and decreases the chance that the minor fix causes a major regression issue.
Despite what people think, Microsoft doesn't have unlimited resources.
Well, they didn't.
If you RTFA, you'll see that Vista's unpatched vulnerabilities are not considered "critical" because, thanks to Vista's improved security model, are virtually impossible to exploit.
Slashdot actually managed to spin a highly positive analysis of Vista into something that suggests Vista is not only worse than XP, but Microsoft is somehow going out of its way *not* to fix it.
Gotta love it. Slashdot is the GOP of technology news sites.
Indeed.
A more fair comparison would be to compare two versions that were released at around the same time and have about the same overall usage.
I'm not sure there is quite a perfect match in this respect between IIS and Apache.
That said, it's hard to deny that Microsoft has completely turned around on security, at least with respects to some of their newer products. IIS 6, ISA Server, and Vista have all (at least so far) shown to be far more resilient to attacks than anything Microsoft has done before.
I'm not sure comparing IIS 6 to Apache 2.2 is particularly fair. Apache 2.2 was released in December of 2005. IIS 6 was released in March of 2003. It has had about 2 more years for people to attack it and find bugs.
First, there is not nearly enough information provided by Google to come to any real conclusions.
It could be that IIS is more likely to become infected than Apache and then be used to distribute malware, or it could be that malware purveyors are more likely to host their malware on IIS. Or it could be a combination of both.
They also fail to mention what versions of IIS we're talking about, as that makes a huge difference. IIS 5.x had more holes than a cubic mile of swiss cheese. IIS 6, on the other hand, appears to be rock solid and actually has fewer vulnerabilities than Apache.
Second, the fact that Google is a direct competitor to Microsoft is an obvious reason to find their conclusions dubious, at best. They have plenty of reasons to bash Microsoft at every possible opportunity.
The fact remains, IIS 6 has never had a remotely exploitable hole. Period. And it has been on the market for over 4 years.
Microsoft learned from their mistakes and are making their software secure, not just by Microsoft standards, but clearly by any standard.
You can talk about old versions of software all you want, but it's just an attempt to deflect from the fact that your comment about "Bagdad Bob" would be more accurately assigned to people like you, not Microsoft.
There are many, many things you can criticize IE for... but being bloated doesn't really seem like one of them. If you RTFA, they compare the growing bloat not with IE, but with Mozilla.
True, 3rd party add-ons for IE can bring it to a crawl, but that's not IE's fault. The same problem exists in any browser that supports extensibility via a plugin model.
I use Firefox on XP because it's safer than IE, certainly not because it's less bloated. Firefox consistently uses far more ram (I have several screen shots of Firefox using 1.5GB+ of ram with *no* plugins enabled and just one tab open), dies a painful death due to poor integration with things like Flash (100% CPU Flash advertisements, anyone?), or simply just crashes.
On Vista I use IE 7 w/Protected Mode. Why? Well, again, because it's safer. But it also has the benefit of returning me to the days when a browser didn't use 2x the RAM of Photoshop. Imagine that.
It was modded as flamebait because of my Bush Administration comment, I'm sure.
Really, it was flamebait I guess... but my other points are valid regardless of my unnecessary, but imho funny (and accurate), political analogy.