I’ve been meaning to write about this story in SearchSecurity since it came out 11/29/04: New Year’s resolution: Select alternative hardware and software. I was going to complain that Shawna misquoted me as saying:

"There are lots of ways to protect ourselves, which we elect not to employ, on the whole. One would be to switch to another platform — there are plenty of viable ones out there," Pete Lindstrom, research director for Malvern, Pa.-based Spire Security, said in an e-mail interview.

Except when I went back to the email, I realized that she had quoted me exactly. Bummer. But I will certainly contend that it was taken out of context and that, within the scope of the article’s title, it is a bit misleading.

Here is the full text (excluding preliminaries and followups) so you can decide for yourself:

Basically, we got exactly what we wanted, but it wasn’t what we needed. In general, people want continuous innovations. In the consumer and personal computer world, this means constantly adding on features to our PCs while still being able to run our old applications – backwards compatibility. There was a clear choice between Windows 3.0/3.1 and OS/2 and people went with the one that provided them the most backwards compatibility.

There are lots of ways to protect ourselves which we elect not to employ, on the whole. One would be to switch to another platform – there are plenty of viable ones out there. Another would be to use stronger host intrusion prevention software.

Btw, any discourse having to do with "lockin" should enforce the idea that all lockin is voluntary – there are many, many more options available to computer users today than there ever have been in the past.

In essence, I don’t believe that people should switch, just that they could if they were so inclined. In general, I believe a switch for security purposes is unnecessary and the benefits of being on a standard platform outweigh those of switching.