For those who continue to bash Microsoft - A Question

cosworth wrote in post #3190650
Chase Merchant Services is the world's largest processor of Visa and MasterCard transactions. First Data is a close second.

"one of " and "is" are often mistaken.

either way, it's huge enough to be up there

In2Photos wrote in post #3188768
Let us change the scenario for a second. Rather than this be about computers let us make it about cars. Microsoft designs and builds "cars" for 90-95% of the world, while all the "other" car manufacturers design and

Ah! "Lies, damm lies, and statistics". Not that your figures are wrong (although I have seen the share given as high as 97%), but these figures can be deceptive.

In the server market (I know this isn't what we're talking about but it helps illustrate the weakness of figures), Microsoft claimed a 33% share of server revenues in 2005 ... kind of dated but they won't have reached a 90% share by 2007. Counting by units shipped (I've laughed at analysts who do this) shows the x86 platform dominating, but that counts a loaded Fire25K (with over a 100 CPUs) as the same size as a 2-CPU x86 server!

Of course we're not buying servers to process our images, but neither are we buying normal PCs just to browse the web and write the occasional letter. We probably drive our machines harder than most, are more discerning about what we buy, and spend more on the hardware.

I suspect (time for a survey?) that we're more likely to be 80% Windows, 15% Mac, and 5% Linux.

Not that it makes much difference though. You will carry on using what you prefer and I'll carry on using what I prefer.

hmv wrote in post #3190803
Ah! "Lies, damm lies, and statistics". Not that your figures are wrong (although I have seen the share given as high as 97%), but these figures can be deceptive.

In the server market (I know this isn't what we're talking about but it helps illustrate the weakness of figures), Microsoft claimed a 33% share of server revenues in 2005 ... kind of dated but they won't have reached a 90% share by 2007. Counting by units shipped (I've laughed at analysts who do this) shows the x86 platform dominating, but that counts a loaded Fire25K (with over a 100 CPUs) as the same size as a 2-CPU x86 server!

Of course we're not buying servers to process our images, but neither are we buying normal PCs just to browse the web and write the occasional letter. We probably drive our machines harder than most, are more discerning about what we buy, and spend more on the hardware.

I suspect (time for a survey?) that we're more likely to be 80% Windows, 15% Mac, and 5% Linux.

Not that it makes much difference though. You will carry on using what you prefer and I'll carry on using what I prefer.

Now I ask you, what percent of the entire computer market does the server market make? I could skew the numbers even more into Microsoft's favor and say that if you look at small businesses Microsoft likely holds 98% of the market share, but it still is only one small part. I personally do not know of ANYONE (outside of this forum) that uses a MAC. So Microsoft actually has a 100% share of the people that Mike knows.:p

Just was told that Aquarium uses OSX server

Village_Idiot wrote in post #3189614
Name me 10 companies that run an Apple OS on their servers thats primary function is to store credit card numbers and process credit card transactions.

I'd be surprised if there weren't at least 10 companies doing this. Most places who worry about the security of their backend servers don't tell people what they run. You may be able to find out what someone is using as a web server but not many are dumb enough to store credit card numbers on such a server.

Oh! And server security is part of my job.

hmv wrote in post #3190889
I'd be surprised if there weren't at least 10 companies doing this. Most places who worry about the security of their backend servers don't tell people what they run. You may be able to find out what someone is using as a web server but not many are dumb enough to store credit card numbers on such a server.

Oh! And server security is part of my job.

I'm sure there are more than 10, but how many are running some for of windows server?

In2Photos wrote in post #3190828
Now I ask you, what percent of the entire computer market does the server market make? I could skew the numbers even more into Microsoft's favor and say that if you look at small businesses Microsoft likely holds 98% of the market share, but it still is only one small part. I personally do not know of ANYONE (outside of this forum) that uses a MAC. So Microsoft actually has a 100% share of the people that Mike knows.:p

According to a very rough calculation servers count for about 7% of the total revenue, although that wasn't the point I was trying to make. In fact your point about the small businesses also makes my point.

Which Mike? This one knows plenty who don't run Windows, although as I work in the IT industry, I do know some pretty odd people

Village_Idiot wrote in post #3190939
I'm sure there are more than 10, but how many are running some for of windows server?

Undoubtedly quite a few, but the decision on what server to buy isn't always made by the most appropriate people ("I run Windows at home so of course it's the best choice for the data centre").

Actually in a well protected environment it shouldn't matter what servers this credit card information is on, becuase such servers should be so well protected that a hacker shouldn't be able to reach them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeW

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In2Photos wrote in post #3188768
So what happens if Apple starts to take over some of Microsoft's large share? Does anyone else think that the "problems" that plague Microsoft will also plague Apple?

Good thing Microsoft exist. From what I've seen from Steve Jobs, he is not interested in becoming the next Microsoft. Its like comparing BMW against GM. Although BMW has a very small market share compared to GM, we all know BMWs are much better cars in terms of aesthetics, quality, and performance. Now maybe Apple can do to Microsoft what Toyota has done to GM

God how I love these WIndows vs. Mac debates...

BMW is better in terms of quality? You might want to talk to Consumer Reports about that. BMW (as all German makers) gets smashed by their ratings.
Mac is a niche market. I was a huge Mac supporter till I went out into the real world. I was a programmer/IT guy/systems designer at a major software company for many years. Apple gave us a dozen or so PowerMacs (does that date me?) to try to write a client for. The company never bothered. I took a couple of the Power Macs, gave em to some kids I knew. Since there wasn't much in the way of games, I'm pretty sure they never really got used. Now, that said, our graphics department all had Macs on their desks - and PC's too. The Mac is a designers tool, not much else.
Yep, MS OS's are the least secure because they're the most hacked. If Apple suddenly came up with a 20% market share, they'd be getting a little more attention and the security (or lack of) of their OS would get scrutiny too. Most hackers I've met couldn't care less about Apple. I met guys with more interest in hacking cell phone OS's than Macs. It's not a more secure OS necessarily by design, but rather by lack of interest.
Oh yeah - when my department got robbed (scary too as I was there, they just happened to bypass my office at 1am), the thieves were interested in the Power Macs. One of them was used to keep a door open so they could steal the PC's. See? Macs do have their uses.

NorCalAl wrote in post #3238017
BMW is better in terms of quality? You might want to talk to Consumer Reports about that. BMW (as all German makers) gets smashed by their ratings.

Yes I meant quality; reliability might be a different issue.

My old roommate in college was also an IT major and they hated macs. Actually I did too until they released OSX and utilized the Unix platform. In college I wouldn't touch anything that wasn't Unix (Solaris, Ultrix, IRIX, etc. included). Sadly, when I went into the real world, they jammed Windows into my life--all because of the stupid MS Office apps. Even wonder why fault tolerant (think five 9s) application are mostly designed on Unix OSs? Thats right... less chance of crashing...

To the OP

The car analogy doesn't apply. It's faulty.

Microsoft designs the interface, intel designs the motor and asia designs all the addon accessory. With the same motor and different accessories you can build yourself a performance lamborghini or a contruction truck.

Apple is more like a private streetcar. You can't use all the roads, just the ones that have tracks in them.

And apple commercials are moronic. The ones that are into serious video editing have been using macs for a long time. The consumers have more than enough tools on windoza to edit anything and everything.

DocFrankenstein wrote in post #3243160
The car analogy doesn't apply. It's faulty.

Microsoft designs the interface, intel designs the motor and asia designs all the addon accessory. With the same motor and different accessories you can build yourself a performance lamborghini or a contruction truck.

Apple is more like a private streetcar. You can't use all the roads, just the ones that have tracks in them.

Yours is a bad analogy as well. If you're trying to compare cars vs. cars, then saying that Macs can't use all roads is not fair.

It's always amusing to watch these debates when they're played out by people who really don't know that much about computers, and so resort to using logic that seems to make sense but doesn't, and throwing out faulty analogies to try and back it up.

For starters, the car analogy completely doesn't apply. Windows' market share has nothing to do with its quality, and everything to do with the fact that now that they have that market share, it's going to be almost impossible to take away. You assume that there's straight-up competition like there is with cars; what if this hypothetical massively dominant car maker was the only manufacturer that had large amounts of affective advertising available, if switching to a competitor's car meant having to almost relearn driving, not because it's better or worse, but simply because it's different, and if using a competitor's car meant that you couldn't get service at most garages, and a whole host of third party accessories wouldn't work, simply because they were designed in such a way as to make it deliberately difficult for the competing cars to work with them? Now how even does the competition look? Add in what basically amounts to threats from the dominant manufacturer to car dealerships that consider actually selling the competitor's car, and you can see that the desktop operating system market is about as far from automobile manufacturing as you can get.

As for the whole security by obscurity thing, you will never hear this argued by people who are actually familiar with the Unix way of doing things. There is a very fundamental difference between the Unix user permission system and Windows' [lack of] security. Regardless of whether some program can somehow manage to spawn itself across hosts of Mac and/or GNU/Linux machines, the damage it can do is going to be SEVERELY limited, unless the user actually types a password to allow it to do more. Besides that, there's responsiveness (this one doesn't apply to the Macs). When there's a critical flaw found in a free operating system, it's patched within hours; I've seen critical 0-day exploits in Windows hang around unpatched for days. There's a very good reason that despite the fact that Windows Server is a minority in the market, vs. Unix servers, the vast majority of seriously compromised servers are running Windows. The fact is, Windows security doesn't work well, even in areas where it's not the dominant operating system.

Also, as a side-note, we're not talking about Mandatory Access Control. "Mac" is an abbreviation of "Macintosh," not an acronym for anything.