"A high volume system like [Windows] that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure," Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference at London's Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. "To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," said Gates, referring to operating systems that have a smaller share of the desktop market, such as Apple Mac OS and Linux. . . .
As the MyDoom virus spread rapidly across the Internet on Monday, Bill Gates extolled the value of such attacks and warned against other operating systems' complacency

Microsoft chief software architect Bill Gates took a side-swipe at rival operating systems on Monday, as he reiterated the importance of security for Windows; in particular its next version, which is codenamed Longhorn.

As the latest mass-mailing worm spread across the Internet on Monday, infecting many tens of thousands of Windows PCs with a program designed to attack the servers of Unix vendor SCO Group on 1 February, Gates stressed the importance of security to his company's products, but said that competing vendors -- such as SCO -- were courting danger by sitting back.

"A high volume system like [Windows] that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure," Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference at London's Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. "To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," said Gates, referring to operating systems that have a smaller share of the desktop market, such as Apple Mac OS and Linux.

Noting the large number of major virus epidemics during the past two years, Gates said that in some ways "hackers are good for maturation" of the platform, because they have forced the company to develop new inspection techniques for the code.

But patch management continues to be the largest headache, said Gates. "Everybody who had their software completely up to date [during the epidemics] was immune to those problems. But only 20 percent of our customers were, so obviously we weren't doing enough." Part of the problem is with taxonomy, said Gates, such as making clear whether a patch is essential or just advised. Furthermore, patches are too large, and their regularity was not predictable. For instance, in December, Microsoft issued a patch through its Automatic Update service just one day after saying that it would issue no patches that month.

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