Favorite Sport: Bashing Microsoft

I have just found this article: The Apple of the Enterprise's Eye on OSNews. It is about what Apple has to offer in the enterprise market. What I want to comment about is not the main subject of the article but the fun way the author bashes Microsoft:

My employer, a globe-spanning technology company with hundreds of thousands of employees, spent the last two weeks in fire-fighting mode, trying to stamp out traces of problems caused by the Sasser worm. Our networks were barely usable, internal servers were inoperable, and even as I write this some critical services are still on the blink.

I am currently participating in a project costing the company over $1 million (trust me, that's not as impressive as that sounds), and with the short timeline that's been imposed, the last two weeks' outages have been a disaster; there's now no way we'll make deadline, and that's going to cost the company money.

This isn't the first time that those widely-publicized Windows security issues have bitten this company. When you think of both man-hours trying to fix the problem, and the combined loss of productivity in a company this size, the cost must be amazing. So the question must be asked: how can this company -- indeed, any large corporation -- rationally choose to support a Windows infrastructure?

When this guy talks about the company he works for, the budget of his project, etc., he does makes it sound pretty impressive. I guess such a company should also have a good training budget for its IT department. If they have a big and spanning Windows infrastructure, they must be using the right management tools.

Then how is it that they could not stop the Sasser worm? If I were in charge, I would probably fire them all before I bite the cyanide pill myself.

Don't take me wrong. I think Microsoft MUST solve their problems and that is to make a default and unmanaged Windows environment a very safe place to be. But this is taking time and even when they finish (for instance, they ship XP SP2 and 2K3 SP1) we will still see people writing new worms for many platforms. In the meanwhile, this kind of religious bashing contributes nothing.

Well, this is not the first, and it won't be the last time I hear this kind of rhetoric from people in the IT business. This guy seems not to be the case, but I can say that most times it comes from guys whose only Microsoft experience is using Windows Me (ouch!) at home.