Happy Birthday: 5 Jahre Windows XP

Amüsant lesbar ist eine Kolumne in der Washington Post über den 5. Geburtstag von WindowsXP: If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP.

Ich bin ja immer beeindruckt, wie lange so eine WindowsXp-Installation mittlerweile braucht, bis man mal alle Sicherheits-Patches, etc. endlich installiert hat. Da hat man in der selben Zeit mehrere Rechner mit Linux fertig installiert und konfiguriert. Und dann hört man immer die unbegründeten Bedenken, dass eine Linux-Installation kompliziert und langwierig wäre…

Hier nur mal ein paar Zitate aus der Kolumne:

But XP has also become an apt demonstration of the difference between „popular“ and „widely used.“ People use XP but don’t love it. Why should they?

You can think of Windows XP as a house with a second floor built of spackle, wood filler and duct tape.

Windows XP has failed its users worst at keeping them safe from viruses, worms and spyware. Service Pack 2 shut some of the worst holes, but XP still demands far more oversight than its competitors. You can’t just blame that on the cockroach-like persistence of the crooks responsible for releasing all the garbage. Microsoft didn’t do its job, and that failing goes far beyond individual vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

But could it have known how bad things would get? Could anyone? The review of XP that ran under this byline five years ago never even used the word „security.“ That raises a scary thought: What’s the ugly flaw in Windows Vista that people will be screaming about in 2010, but is escaping people’s attention right now?