Microsoft COO: Vista and Windows 7 Safer Than Mac

tool being who in that sentence?

Easy enough to test:

(1) Put a bunch of Win7 PCs on the internet with no antivirus.
(2) Connect an equal number of iMacs with no antivirus to the internet.
(3) Ask this tool to bet his next paycheck on the outcome.

+2 for JP, for not letting someone (Ross) bullshitting is way through. 5yr old PC for sure noes not meet Vista requirements!

How would you know you didn't acquire any viruses if you didn't have anti-virus to tell you you had them? How can you claim to be savvy with computers and not use antivirus? However, I do agree that SAV is terribly resource hundgry. ESET NOD32 is a far better product. Even Microsoft admits Vista is far more resource hungry than XP. I find it very hard to believe that a Vista installation can run as fast as XP on a five year old PC, that more likely than not barely meets the Vista requirements.

Actually, my figures are wrong... The Apple stock would now be worth $11,000.

Microsoft came down from monopoly status before the window of my figures. Plain and simple. Investors don't are about that... The fact remains if an investor placed $1000 with Microsoft in early 2000, it would now be ~ $600. If the same investment was made with Apple, it would now be ~$1100. Investors care about results... Microsoft needs to get their act together... The one thing that Microsoft did right was make Vista, it was the best Macintosh promotion ever. Ever since Vista people started to buy macs again.

"I don’t know about safer… BUT it is definitely much more annoying when trying to install software updates."

LOL - Yes, because we all know that clicking "Allow" is infinitely more difficult than typing the root password (or some user's password that has sudoer priviledges) and clicking "OK".

And updating Linux? It's not hard... when it doesn't corrupt glibc and take down your whole OS. But I'd still classify typing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
as being more difficult for the average user than clicking "Install Updates" and clicking "Allow". As for dist-upgrade... let's not even go there.

"Even worse, the security Microsoft has implemented takes a massive percentage of the CPU resources making a locked down Vista a pain to use even on high end PCs."

You do realize that UAC uses no CPU at all unless you actually need to elevate, right? And that takes, what? A few microseconds of CPU time? Maybe milliseconds on a slow day? The things in Vista that can make it seem sluggish (which are ironically designed to increase speed) have nothing to do with security. It's the Windows Search index service and SuperFetch that can make Vista seem slow at times, but even that isn't due to CPU usage. It's the HDD usage of those that slows the system down. However, once you've been logged in for 30 seconds or so, you rarely notice either one of those unless you just have a slow HDD. Btw, Vista ran fine (at least as fast as XP) on my computer that was 5 years old at the time back during the betas. It's run fine on every machine I've had it on since then (which has been several and few of them have been high-end.)

Now, there are several anti-virus programs that will make any computer seem sluggish (Symantec and McAfee for starters,) but that has nothing to do with MS or Vista. It's not MS's fault that Symantec decided that they need to use 250 MB or your RAM even while not running a scan and it's not MS's fault that you installed SAV. I've run plenty of Windows boxes for years and I've never used an anti-virus program on a box of which I've been the primary user. And in that same time, I've acquired 0 viruses.

Microsoft also came down from monopoly status JP, no one can stay up that hot forever. -1 for you.

Vista is a failure. Lets just look at the stock price... In the past ten years Apple stock increased over 1000%, Microsoft decresed almost 60%. TEN YEARS... LOST 60%! They suck...

-1 Marcus

Its true, and Vista is not a failure. Its great, people just love to hate MS. If you dont like it go elsewhere.. Its good Apple is finally make some headway. MS will only get better now.

+1 Jack

This guy is the biggest fool on the planet. Only Microsoft would have the nerve to say this.

This just looks like a reason to push people to upgrade to the failed Vista, and then again to Windows 7.

As a developer of Windows security product we know how easy it is to infiltrate Windows.

Even worse, the security Microsoft has implemented takes a massive percentage of the CPU resources making a locked down Vista a pain to use even on high end PCs.

clever.

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the most painful, most locked down OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most locked down OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the most painful and most locked down OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7. We broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, and that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be a pain is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

That's for sure.

I don't know about safer... BUT it is definitely much more annoying when trying to install software updates.