4 Responses

1. jnaughton

   05|Jan|2006 1

   This is a reminder that the costs of dealing with Windows vulnerabilities should always be factored into Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations when making comparisons between Microsoft and alternatives. As far as I can see, though, the cost of patching MS stuff is rarely teken into account.

2. jnaughton

   05|Jan|2006 2

   Er, excuse typo in comment. For ‘teken’ read ‘taken’

3. Philip East

   06|Jan|2006 3

   I have trashed Explorer completely.I am a Mac user and find Safari(default),Opera and Omniweb great browsers.I don’t rate Firefox that highly,for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into now.
   I use Micosoft Office for Mac and its Entourage suite as my emailer;web based email on top,if required.Mac Mail is excellent and AppleWorks is not to be sniffed at,as alternatives.One can easily live without Microsoft,almost forgetting it exists.
   Given its propensity to security holes I am surprised anyone bothers with it.It is the numbers game and people are ill-informed.I think Macs are so much better.

4. Quentin

   06|Jan|2006 4

   Philip -

   I agree; I’ve been a Mac user for a few years now and have never regretted it. I do still use Microsoft Office (even though it’s the most unreliable software on my machine) but fortunately, its importance is decreasing rapidly for me because so much of the content-production that I used to feed through a word-processor and onto paper now goes onto the web instead.

   I think there are few reasons not to use Macs for people who work fairly independently. The only major limitations I’ve come across have been for people who need to integrate closely with other business systems and practices; minimal support for Outlook and Exchange, rather fewer accounting packages, and so forth.

   But for me, it’s been perfect!