...from:
http://www.macworld.com/article/139937/2009/04/what_price_cool.html?lsrc=mw…
Microsoft's 'Apple tax' needs a refund
Posted on Apr 9, 2009 3:29 pm by Dan Moren
Category | Mac
Some people look at numbers and think “Ah, thank goodness: cold hard
facts.” Me, I’ve been a bit distrustful of numbers ever since that
whole "7 ate 9" business. You see, numbers purport to be all objective
and straightforward, but just like words, their meanings can be
twisted and turned, interpreted to suit the agenda of whoever's
holding their leash.
Take, for example, this recent report (PDF link) by frequently-quoted
analyst Roger L. Kay, the President of Endpoint Technologies
Associates. “What Price Cool?” sets out to discover the “hidden costs”
of owning Macs versus owning Windows PCs—but you don’t need to flip to
the end of the 10-page report to tell how it’s going to end. Spoiler:
Windows PCs are cheaper! It’s right there on page one, where it reads
“Sponsor: Microsoft.”
The Redmond-based software giant has recently gone to great lengths to
point out Windows machines' inherent superiority, attempting to
dispell the perceived "coolness" of Macs anddenigrate their
performance. So it’s hardly shocking to find that this report retreads
the same ground whilst applying a thin patina of carefully selected
“facts.”
The meat of the piece is the last three pages which feature the
“realistic point of view” of a hypothetical family of four, including
two charts that line up the prices of building what are supposedly
comparable Windows PC and Mac systems. The hypothetical dad's
spreadsheet examines the differences in cost over five years and—
amazingly—concludes that buying Macs will be a mind-boggling $3,330
more expensive.
There are a few flaws here—okay, there are several flaws here, and to
pick them apart one-by-one would only be redundant, repetitive, and
redundant, but let’s take a look at just a few of them to get the idea.
For one thing, the report repeats the age-old fallacy that once you
buy into a Mac you have to buy into the whole Apple ecosystem, despite
the fact that we largely left that world behind around the time that
people were wondering who precisely had let the dogs out.
For example, Kay budgets $150 per year for Apple’s MobileMe service—
that being the price of the MobileMe family pack, which supports up to
five users. But you don’t need MobileMe—Kay says it’s for backup and
file sync, both of which can be accomplished with free technologies
provided by Apple and others. Heck, the Windows Live Mesh that Kay
touts even runs on a Mac. But similar third-party syncing services
like Dropbox work well too. And, for backup, every Mac comes with Time
Machine built-in. Look, I just saved the hypothetical family a
hypothetical $750—hypothetically, of course. Kay also insists, for
some reason, that the family buy an AirPort Extreme router for $180
instead of the $150 Linksys Wireless N router that he budgeted for the
PCs, despite the fact that the Mac and Linksys routers are
interoperable. You could save another $30 (or—and I know this is going
out on a limb—you could spend the extra $30 to buy the AirPort Extreme
for the PC side because it's a better product. Hey, it's an option).
Here’s another wacky choice: Kay suggests the family will want add Blu-
ray capability (which, it’s true, is not currently supported by OS X)
to the desktop system in year four. He budgets $95 for a Lite-On
internal drive for the PC and $300 for an external Sony Blu-ray drive
for the Mac. Never mind that, as they've chosen the extremely
expandable Mac Pro, they could easily upgrade the computer with that
same internal Blu-ray drive (presuming, of course, that four years
from now, Apple’s added Blu-ray support to OS X—if not, that Sony
player won't be much more useful anyway). Knock off another $205.
But let’s look at this from the other side for a moment: what’s been
left out of the costs of owning a PC? Well, how about security?
Malware is a pretty common sight on Windows PCs and you won’t find any
expert recommending you run your machine without virus protection. But
most virus protection costs a certain amount per year: HP, for
example, includes 15 months of Norton Internet Security for free, but
that’ll leave the family out in the cold just over a year in—they’ll
have to spend another $60 to $80 to cover them for the whole five year
period. And that’s just for one of the two computers. Not much, but it
adds up.
The report also makes a big deal out of having to re-buy existing
Windows software for OS X, but it barely touches upon the immense
value of all the software included with every Mac. iLife is referred
to only by the cost of upgrading it, and Kay doesn’t bother to
enumerate what similar capabilities—music creation, video editing, DVD
authoring—would cost on Windows.
And then there’s Windows itself. Kay says in his report how great
Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 7 will be: “This gap [in user
experience] will likely close up when Microsoft introduces Windows 7
late this year.” And yet, mysteriously, no mention is made anywhere of
the price it’ll cost this family to upgrade to Windows 7, if it
doesn’t ship by the time they want to buy their new computers. In
truth, that’s because nobody knows, but Vista’s cheapest software
costs $200 a pop, suggesting our hypothetical family will have to
shell out around $400 if they want to get all the improvements to help
close that "user experience gap." Apple’s forthcoming Snow Leopard
update, by comparison, will run $200 for the whole family, if the
company sticks to the pricing scheme it's been using for years.
Add up all those tweaks and you’ll find the price difference has
almost been halved—and that’s just with the no-brainer changes. But
it’s like I said up top: despite looking all serious and factual,
numbers can be massaged and carefully selected to tell any story. And
as much as figures and charts might tell you about cost, they speak
very little to the idea of what you get for that money—of value beyond
specifications and technologies. What about the time saved not dealing
with viruses and annoying security software? What about those hard-to-
quantify benefits of what Kay admits is a superior user experience?
Kay would have you believe that everything can be reduced to
quantitative measurements, and that’s emblematic of the way Microsoft
operates. But there are plenty of important qualitativedifferences as
well. The report bandies about the term “cool” like a four-letter
word, but it mistakes the trappings of "cool" for its substance. True
coolness is never really about appearance and only those who just
don't get it claim that it is. Apple’s computers are fantastically
designed and aesthetically attractive, but that's not what makes them
cool—what makes them cool is what they allow their users to do. And
for many, that's worth a few extra bucks.
...from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/technology/10virus.html?th&emc=th
Malicious Software Is Revised
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 9, 2009
The riddle of a malicious software program that has spread throughout
the Internet deepened Thursday as security researchers examined a new
version of the software that they said made it more difficult to
eradicate the program.
The program, known as Conficker, targets versions of Microsoft’s
Windows operating system and has now been distributed in four
versions, computer security specialists said.
Several of the groups monitoring the program said the most recent
version, which began to appear Tuesday, appeared to be targeted at
improving a peer-to-peer communications system between computers that
are infected and hardening the system by making infected machines more
resistant to anti-virus software.
Several researchers also said there might be a connection between the
authors of Conficker and of another program known as Waladec, a
malware program that has been used to distribute fraudulent
advertisements through e-mail spam. They also noted that the Conficker
authors have switched strategies and are using the program’s peer-to-
peer mechanism to update the system. Originally, they had appeared to
plan to download instructions to Conficker by generating new Internet
addresses that infected machines could download instructions from.
An earlier version of the program had been set to begin contacting
servers on April 1, raising widespread concern about the authors’
intent. Now, however, the system for programming Conficker uses a peer-
to-peer mechanism that can be initiated from any one of millions of
infected systems.
The consensus within the computer security industry is that although
there are now some indications that Conficker’s authors are intent on
building a giant spam system, there is no hard evidence.
“This is just Step 5 in a thousand-step chess match,” said Vincent
Weafer, vice president of the security response division at Symantec.
