What Disaster Will It Take For Corporations to Seriously Consider Macs?

You know, I do believe in Santa Claus. After all, every Christmas morning he's left prezzies for my kids. Whether he's a jolly old fellow in a red suit from the North Pole with flying reindeers, well, that's open to debate. And I also believe that Macs are less vulnerable to viruses than Windows computers. Which makes wonder if too many IT people think that's a fairy tale.

A lot of people don't want to believe that. You've heard them before, "As soon as the Mac gets more popular, the virus writers will be all over it." Yeah... okay... let's see... they said that when Macs had 2% marketshare and now Macs are up to almost 10% marketshare (depending on which figures you look at). But that obviously is an insignificant increase. Yep, that must be it.

Of course, recently we did see a Mac trojan; however, trojans aren't viruses. The key of a virus is your operating system's security is so weak, the virus doesn't require human assistance to hack into your computer, do its dastardly worst and then hop along to someone else's computer. (Really, what's so bad about a virus that wipes a PC's hard disk? Isn't wiping out Windows a community service.)

In some places the solution to viruses is strict security. You might say foolproof security, even. But that's risky, because didn't someone once say that the definition of foolproof security is only a fool can breach it?

Now take my kids' primary school, for example. It's gone down the tighening security approach. Each week I take its newsletter home on a USB stick, convert it from MS Publisher to a PDF and upload it to the school's website. Late last year they implemented new security whereby USB sticks weren't allowed in computers that were used to access critical data - for fear of a virus causing the loss of that data. So now the process is more convoluted to get that file.

I'm not picking on them. This is what they need to do; this is the sort of security necessary on an open network; this is what it takes.

Or should take. I shook my head when I read this week of the Houston municipal court that was knocked out by a virus. I know it's not easy to keep everything out, but I do wonder if they were doing enough.

Although, what is enough? Get rid of all the fools? Tempting. But the real fools are the ones who have it in their power to change but don't. Who'd rather "the devil they know". Who'd rather think "Macs will get viruses one day" and so stick with their Windows systems even though new threats are appearing at a much greater rate (than the Mac), and old ones sometimes resurface in new form (as happened in Houston).

Changing ships is massively expensive, so (especially in light of last week's article about budgets hindering people's purchase of Macs) I understand the reluctance. But the cost of something nasty getting through can be much greater.

Change can be made though.  As I say, I do believe the Mac is an inherently significantly more secure platform than Windows, and that that's no fairytale. Holes may be found in time, but the management of patching those holes is so much easier than Windows, which for many years resembled a sieve, and as fast as one hole was patched another would appear. And some of those holes are still leaking - just ask Houston if they've got a problem.

What will it take for change to happen? How big a disaster? Who will take the lead and say enough? Who, rather than trying (and failing) to squeeze the cost of conversion into a budget, will set their budget based on the cost of conversion?

Although I do wonder, would Apple cope if there was a massive swing to its computer systems? Is it prepared? Is it even interested? Maybe that last question is why it's not happening.