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Weblog:   Mac's New Slogan: Viruses for the Rest of Us
Subject:   John Gruber's demolition of a similar argument
Date:   2005-03-23 02:27:39
From:   dscotson
John Gruber already addressed this very weak argument about viruses and market share:


http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows


The money shot:
The reason this argument is so popular with Windows apologists is that it’s a convenient bit of rhetoric. They say it’s so, we say it’s not. You can’t get past this argument, because it can’t be disproven without the Mac OS actually attaining a Windows-like market share.


So, let’s concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there’d be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.


Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market — that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success — isn’t it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever “doomed” to be significantly more secure than Windows?
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  • John Gruber's demolition of a similar argument
    2005-03-23 04:43:56  jwenting [Reply | View]

    so a MacAddict tells us Mac users have nothing to worry about because he says so...<br/>
    Indeed Mac users will always have less to worry about, but only because Macs will never get any real market share...
  • John Gruber's demolition of a similar argument
    2005-03-23 02:31:43  dscotson [Reply | View]

    I just noticed that Preston goes further than the articles and their quoted experts and actually concedes that the Mac malware problem will always be magnitudes less than the Windows one. A sobering reflection after quoting all the scaremongering, but one that is missing from almost every other report on this publicity stunt, so well done.
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