Not to get back into another one of our glorious "conversations", hehe, but wouldn't what you say mean that it's a complete 180 from what MS has already done, and that's provide "ease of use over stability and security"? Not trying to start anything, but MS has been lax across the board over the years when it comes to security and stability and while I'm extremely glad that they're trying to improve OS stability and security, by no means should that mean that their attempts break 3rd party programs who're inherently better at their single task than MS is, aka Sygate, Outpost, and ZA being better at firewalling.Quote:
Originally posted here by pooh sun tzu
The real question at hand is "Is the normal public ready for that big of a step?"
Imagine them placing a stateful inbound and outbound firewall that has popups as to program control to the internet (a zone alarm clone). Think of how many people who use the Windows OS are not currently at a level of computer knowledge to deal with what will happen next.
AIM suddenly won't connect. MSN won't transfer files. Not all websites work now. IRC won't work. Video conferencing won't connect. A billion things that involve having a firewall and configuring it to allow certain programs and services, is beyond the reach of what the public is ready to handle.
So, rather than crippling the entire Windows OS userbase, they are little by little teaching them how things work. By showing them the beginnings of security, people will get "used" to that level.. thus allowing MS to add another leve lof security as time goes on so they can get "used" to yet another level of security.. and so forth and so on.
We know they could patch up a firewall to destroy the skills of zonealarm and kerio, so why not? Because they would rather begin the steps towards better security gradually rather than an enourmous drop of it and lose their userbase (in which the people who would know how to deal with it are a very very small minority.)
"A journey of a thousand miles or a thousand days starts with a single step" - Tao Te Ching
MS users of today are not going to become "used" to what MS is doing. They want to point-and-click all day, nothing else. Go to any major business, any home, anywhere an internet connection is present and you'll find MSN and/or AOL (or any other major ISP) along with three different IM clients, and various other things that allow the user to do what they want to do, and that's IM, email, and surf the web while burning cds and listen to music.
I, for one, while glad that MS is doing things to make sure security and stability are a major issue to handle, will not tolerate them removing my ability and choice to use a third party program that will do things better than MS. MS' own registry cleaner doesn't do as good a job as others. Their firewall is years behind major vendors like ZA, Sygate, and Outpost, vendors who've spent years perfecting their own code to do one specific thing. By no means is this post meant to serve as a MS-bashing attempt, but they can improve in other areas. Remove the old code, rewrite it to be better, get rid of bloated things like the games in Office, things like that. MS can go a LONG ways to improve a lot of things without worrying about firewalling (as you would know more than me), and I hope they do so.
I want to go to SP2, I really do. But from what I read and what the past record has shown, it seems to be that MS wants to force people to use their products which are inferior in nature to others. They've got the budget, they've got the staff, why not make a superior product and make me, a poweruser of MS products, say "Wow, I really like this!"?
