Sunbeltblog comments
"Is a monoculture in security truly healthy?"
No, it certainly isn't. On the other hand spreading the technology between vendors isn't the brightest idea either. As I'm sure we have all noticed, they don't exactly have a tendancy to work together too well. One of the few remaining examples of this that remains are the media format wars requiring end users to install real player, quicktime, windows media player, and possibly a few other programs all to do the exact same task - listen to music and watch videos on our computers.
Back in the days of Netscape vs IE, we had standards that neither browser sticked to. Everyone wrote pages for either Netscape or MSIE. Open up a site in a third party browser that only supported the IEEE standards, and you couldn't see anything.
Back in the days of MS Office vs Lotus Smartsuite et al, PDFing wasn't really much of a standard either. You had to hope the company you planned to communicate with used the same software you did because little to no companies actively had both.
About the only "open" standard that people stick to as far as end-user programs go is email, but then again it's such a simple exploitable abusable standard that you can't exactly go wrong. Go inside a company though and how many people are using Lotus Notes on an Exchange server or Outlook on a Domino server? There may be connectors to allow such things, but they barely work (if at all - trust me, my company just migrated from Domino to Exchange).
Before you can get rid of monoculture, you need to change the way these software companies think and work with/against eachother.
This is such crap!
The open source group of losers are pissed because Microsoft does not give software away and now you are pissed because Microsoft does not charge enough.
So what should Microsoft do. Charge so much that no one will buy it? Or should Microsoft give the software away along with the source?
Pick a model?
Commenting by HaloScan
