I saw a rabbit the other day.
I was reminded of it, bizarrely, while reinstalling all the software on my computer after the motherboard was replaced.
Journalists like to highlight the unusual. And seeing a rabbit these days is unusual.
The ubiquitous rabbit has been almost wiped out by the calicivirus. Other animals (and plants) were not affected by the virus, but they have been able to thrive in the absence of rabbits.
Diseases caused by viruses can rip through a species. Viruses thrive in large populations of a single species.
Does the same thing happen with computer viruses? I think so.
Ever more virulent computer viruses are appearing. And they spread quickly throughout the world over the internet, just as their biological versions spread via jet aircraft.
The reason for their success is the lack of species diversity among the computers they are infecting. Nearly all of the viruses attack computers running Microsoft operating systems and software.
The email viruses latch on to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express on PCs using Microsoft Windows – which is most of us.
Apple Mac users have less of a problem. And people who do not use Microsoft at all have no problem.
The analogy cannot be stretched too far because the viruses do not kill the Microsoft software or the Microsoft operating system. But they do slow it down and they do make a nuisance of themselves. In the past few weeks even people with good anti-virus software are getting emails from places they never sent email to stating “you have send us an email infected by a virus”.
This is in addition to the idiotic spam emails from Nigeria wanting access to your bank accounts and advertisements for Viagra. The spam is harmless because it does not virally infect your computer’s operating system in a destructive way; it is just a minor nuisance.
The recent viral attacks could well be a catalyst for the breaking of the Microsoft stranglehold.
This is because the inconvenience of having Microsoft products will slowly outweigh the convenience. The convenience is mainly because everyone else has Microsoft. It is certainly not because of price or the degree of ease and efficiency with which most of its software can be used. Most of its software seems to be engineered for high degrees of user difficulty.
And there perhaps another more important reason.
One of the reasons for Microsoft’s commercial success is the way it has created a vertical monopoly. It got to a position where its Windows program was the underlying operating system on the lion’s share of the world’s computers. The operating system sends commands to hardware (your screen, printer and drives) to allow material to be displayed and stored.
In this time Microsoft has insisted that applications like word-processing, graphics and other software could only work if they made changes to files in the Microsoft operating system and added files to the folders that contained the operating systems’ files.
It meant also that Microsoft’s application software could get a favoured treatment. The operating system and made it difficult to impossible for any other company to compete in selling software that operated on the operating system in areas that Microsoft wanted to dominate, particularly office applications like word processing, spreadsheets, organisers and presentations and internet browsers.
Earlier attempts to break the stranglehold through the courts came to nothing. A judge in the US even ordered that the company be broken up into three separate entities: software, operating system and internet.
But Microsoft just threw a few million dollars worth of lawyers to appeal against the judgment and continues to laugh all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, mug users pay hugely inflated prices for software. They are almost compelled to use Microsoft because everyone else does, and files created in a Microsoft are unreadable unless the recipient has that Microsoft program.
In a more competitive world, basic spreadsheet, text and picture files should be able to be read by any other brand software – in the same way that cars can run on Shell, Mobil and BP petrol.
More importantly computers should not have to run the way the Microsoft operating system makes them run — so that when you load application software it has to alter files in the operating system and add to files in its folders. This is only necessary at present because Microsoft will not release its Windows source code to the creators of application software.
If the source code were available to application creators, computers could work differently.
The operating system could sit as one bundle of files. The software applications would each have their separate bundles of files. And bundled separately again would be all the material created by the user — text, spreadsheets, graphics and, significantly, all of the customising of each software application (you know, the fact you use Times type not Aerial and have finally got rid of that nauseating paperclip help man.)
I am not a computer engineer, but then it should not be beyond the wit of some latter-day Edward Jenner to create an inoculating (SUBS: only one N) firewall around the operating system so that only inoculated program files loaded by the user ever had access to it – and viruses would be shut out.
An added bonus would be that reloading software after a hardware failure would be much easier.
The havoc created by computer viruses recently is not only because so many people use Microsoft products. It is also because of the way Microsoft insists your computer operates. Microsoft wants to ingrain itself into everything your computer does. It wants the equivalent of Microsoft petrol loaded in a Microsoft service station into a Microsoft car. That requires easy access to the operating system, which in turn means easy access by viruses which have no business being there.
It may well be that Microsoft has created the seeds of its own doom.
Given the cost and inconvenience of these viruses and the inflated cost of most Microsoft products people are looking for alternatives and alternatives are being created – the Linux operating system and Software 995’s applications. The latter provides the equivalent of Microsoft’s Office suite for about $40. These says there are millions of users, and software and manuals can be downloaded (saving packaging and retail costs), so there is no justification for inflated prices.
It may be that Microsoft will have to bend its will to the world instead of expecting the world to bend to the will of Microsoft.
Maybe something good will come from all these viruses after all. Unless Microsoft changes, its products might share the fate of the rabbit.