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July 06, 2005
An old theme
I’m an IT professional - I’ve spent well over half my life making computers work for people. While my platform of choice is Mac OS X, I still know much more than the average bear about making Windows XP go where I want it to go. The Dell laptop that my workplace supplies is kept well-patched, lives behind the corporate firewall, has several company-supported GPOs, and runs up-to-date anti-virus software (Trend Micro).
So when I lose a workday and a half clearing my computer of a worm, I become intensely frustrated. The worm, TOMBAI, came courtesy of autoplay. It was undetected by Trend (and failed, in later tests, to identify files recognized by other scanners). It reduced the security settings for IE (which I have to use for several corporate IT services such as SharePoint), such that I found out about my infection via the secondary infections that Trend did detect.
Today, finally, I’m certain it’s clean.
The frustrating part is that, with the knowledge, resources, and support structure I have at my disposal, I lost almost 2 days.
How can the “average” user - running Windows, behind on patches, relying on the spare time of the neighbor’s kid, and likely unwilling to shell out for good security software - even hope to survive?
Why does the consumer tolerate this? In my heart, I know - it’s a combination of low Cost of Entry and undervaluation of personal time. People look more at what it costs to get into a system rather than the total cost (TCO), and they usually undervalue their own time. So they buy systems that are cheap, not factoring in what it’s going to cost to make it run - and keep it running - or the lost value in not really being able to do what you set out to do.
But knowing that intellectually doesn’t really help when you’re so frustrated you want to drop-kick the bloody thing and walk down the street to Microsoft with a fistful of invective. I just don’t understand.
Posted by jim at July 6, 2005 04:13 PM