Topic: Microsoft: Vista Is Twice as Safe as XP – Linux and Tiger Are No Contest

[Amker]

Microsoft could not miss the opportunity presented by the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007 and not beat the old drum of Windows Vista is the safest Windows platform available on the market. And while the vulnerability counting game was played before with Vista as VIP operating system, this time Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer, offered official confirmation at the company's Financial Analyst Meeting 2007. Furthermore he went on to emphasize the fact that not only was Vista more secure than XP, but that in terms 
of a low volume of  vulnerabilities it beat by far all major distributions of Linux and even Mac OS X Tiger.

"Windows Vista is the most secure operating system we've ever released. In the first 180 days we've had far fewer high-severity vulnerabilities than XP. We've had 12 in Vista. We had 25 in XP. And think about the sophistication level of the people that create the vulnerabilities today versus what it was when XP released. It's a far different opportunity today than it was then. Over that same time period, I think you should also note that Windows Vista had far fewer than Apple, as well as any major desktop Linux distributor. (...) But we're not resting on our laurels; that is something we're going to continue to stay focused on. This is the first operating system we've ever launched with security built in on the front end from a foundation standpoint. And, again, we're going to continue to work on that and improve it as we go forward.," stated Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer.

Turner added that thanks to the built-in tools associated with diagnostics, backups and self-healing capabilities of the operating system, Microsoft experienced 21% fewer support calls for Vista in contrast to Windows XP in the first six months of availability. This is of course a positive vote for the platform's reliability. Windows Vista has also come to support in excess of 2.1 million devices. In this context, Microsoft has grown the initial 1.5 million supported devices with over 600,000 additions. Currently, Vista supports approximately 98% of all the devices available today. Moreover, the in excess of 11,000 logoed hardware and devices have been directly associated with the operating system.

"On the application front, over 2,000 applications have earned the Works with Windows Vista or the Certified for Windows Vista logo. That's up from 650 at launch. And so big, big improvements are getting made in this space every single day. Around 70 critical enterprise applications have been updated to be compatible since launch, and I'd like to tell you what a few of those are as it relates to Cisco, Nortel, Adobe, McAfee, Symantec, Citrix, Oracle, Tivoli, SAP, IBM, and many, many others are being resolved daily. And so that's something we've been very focused on since we launched," Turner said.
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