A lesson from the Conficker worm
There’s an important lesson from the Conficker worm outbreak but it doesn’t look like the technology industry wants to learn it. The lesson is that you cannot expect to sell a complicated technology product to hundreds of millions of ordinary, untrained people and expect them all to understand and do all the maintenance that these complex systems may require. Microsoft, in particular, hasn’t yet faced up to the fact that the current versions of Windows are too complicated and insecure for mass consumer use. It also doesn’t seem to want to consider what it means when hundreds of millions of PC users who couldn’t care less how Windows works are all turned loose on the Internet.
I see comments all over the Web by technology professionals tut-tutting about the fact that Conficker need never have happened if only those people out there had just installed the right Windows update patches. The fact is that it is always going to be the case that many Windows users are going to forget or omit Windows updates. And that includes businesses with technical staff. Look at some of the institutions that got Conficker- the French navy, the British Ministry of Defence, the British National Health Service. Conficker is not the first nor will it be the last viral outbreak that could have been prevented “if only those people had done what they were supposed to”.
No matter how much the PC industry pros point their fingers, there are always going to be a lot of PC users who do not do “what they are supposed to”. If Microsoft and all the rest want to sell products to the great masses, they had better make them simpler and safer. Just ask any other kind of company that sells articles for mass consumption. At least in the US, companies that don’t idiot-proof their product soon get sued. Of course, the software industry managed to get itself exempted from any responsibility for faulty products. And therein is one of the reasons that software is so buggy. I hold no brief for the tort bar but, as I have posted before, some sort of accountability should be imposed on the software industry.
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