Monday, February 02, 2004

Mac vs. PC (but no viruses...)

I find myself under constant pressure to return to Windows. I love my Mac. But Microsoft's monopoly power really has a way of making a guy sweat. First it was that Siebel CRM OnDemand application that only works on MS Windows. Then it was WebEx that I was unable to use from my Mac. And everyday I visit web sites that have Javascript errors from my Mac. Even though I am using the latest, greatest version of MS Internet Explorer from Microsoft on my Mac! I would switch to Safari as my web browser, but other sites simply say they don't even recognize the Safari browser...

But no viruses...

One of the things that has made me happy I am on the Mac is that I am not subject to the regular waves of viruses afflicting my colleagues on Windows. Think about it -- a Mac virus simply wouldn't work! There just aren't enough Macs out there to enable a virus to spread. It would get out maybe 2, maybe 3 generations from the origination point, and would find that all of the machines it was connected to were PCs... Now I suppose someone could go to the trouble to write a virus that worked on both PCs and Macs... But why bother when 95% of the time your virus will spread based just on running on PCs.

And isn't this an argument for not having a single operating system in the world? Just like with mono-agriculture, we suffer more damage, more quickly, when a pest infests our mono-operating system world.