Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about On The Causes and Cures of Malware, here is a quick summary:

Thoughts on the John Gruber's suggested 40-40-20 split between Windows, Linux and OS X on the propagation of malware.

You are responding to this comment written by Luke on January 22nd 2008, 11:17.

I think you can attribute a lot of this to upgrade incentives on both OS X and various Linux distros.

After many complaints of service packs introducing bugs, Microsoft made the decision back in the NT 4 days to limit service packs and the like to merely contain fixes and security updates. This is still mostly the case to this day, even with XP SP2s massive payload (it was all security related). For most users, the hassle of downloading a ton of security updates and restarting a few dozen times is a real turn off. With no killer features, who cares whether "Security Update 00001-12-24-2007" gets installed or not?

With Linux, you have constant improvements in performance and new features added daily--staying on the edge is basically the norm for desktop users.

On the Mac front, Leopard 10.5.2 will be out shortly with a slew of cool updates. I can't wait to have a native option to turn off the transparent menubar. That's a day one upgrade for me.

Users respond to incentive.

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