Are Microsoft to blame for "hidden" malware costs and will Windows 7 make any difference?

A good analysis with some nice analogies. I hardly think of the costs of supporting Windows defects as hidden, more like accepted because That's The Way Computers Are.

Well, it's either "cost of malware" or "cost of patching". The latter isn't usually an issue to plain ol' home users, but its enormous for corporations, due to their stupid "we all have to have locked-down MSFT desktops and laptps" policy.

Either way (cost of malware vs cost of patching) you've got to run some kind of "anti-" malware or whatever fearful thing they pitch to Windows users these days.

The article does make a good point about everybody's favorite argument, the Argument from Market Share. The threats have not kept up with the proportion of Macs or Linux boxes in use. Windows continues to have the only significant infestations of Sin-ware or Bad-ware or Evil-ware or whatever the "security" companies pitch these days. The Argument from Market Share is probably false.

I remember being told that our corporate desktops cost $30,000 per year to maintain and secure. That includes helpdesk for some internal apps as well, but you know the bulk of it is swatting Windows vulnerabilities.

> I remember being told that our corporate desktops cost $30,000 per year to maintain and secure.

Hmm. That sounds excessive. I doubt a McAfee subscription program runs more than $100 per desktop per year. The Microsoft licenses shouldn't be more than $400/desktop or so per year. Assuming dedicated tech support of one tech per 100 employees and then tripling that to allow for overhead, help desk, and management, we're still only talking $1500 per year per desktop or so. That adds up to $2000 or so. $3000 per year might be reasonable, but $30,000 sounds way too high.

heh...we don't use any antivirus/antimalware on the lab machines at the college. We just keep them locked down so tight they couldn't break them if they tried. :P

That and we reload them every term or so, so if some student does manage to somehow get something in their profile, it won't be there for long. Given, it's still an absolute pain in the neck to manage since to do anything we have to unlock all the policies then lock them back down.

Of course, we are a rather small institution and don't have nearly the number of machines larger companies have to maintain.

@jdixon

I agree, I remember thinking it must be off by a factor of 10 but that's what they told me.

I was a consultant at the company and they had a $50,000,000 annual budget for their IT staff of about 200 including consultants. They were developing their business around a 3 tier architecture that had Oracle on HP and later Sun, Tuxedo as the middleware and (chuckle chuckle) Visual Basic as the front end. As I was leaving they were doing all new development in Java and porting it to Java. That was about 6 years ago.