Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 3rd May 2009 09:16 UTC, submitted by SReilly
Can you make Windows XP so secure that the United States Air Force will use it in its systems? Well, apparently, you can, but you do have to talk to Microsoft. The USAF wanted a locked-down edition of Windows XP, and since they were in the midst of renegotiating the desktop-software contract with Microsoft, they decided to ask Steve Ballmer directly to create it for them. They did.
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Member since:
2006-09-21
What a lot of people seem to forget is that XP is based upon NT and that NT was designed with security in mind. Microsoft may have botched it through both implicit decisions (such as bad coding) and explicit decisions (such as making it more marketable), but that doesn't mean that XP isn't salvagable.
There are other factors to consider here. The article mentioned taking advantage of technology that trickles down to them, rather than succumbing to NIH syndrome. That means two things: they now have hundreds of millions of people offsetting their costs, and hundreds of millions of people doing basic testing for them. Which is a heck of a lot better than the government spending billions of dollars to reinvent the OS, something which will never benefit anyone outside of the military.
Another advantage of using a broadly deployed technology is access to skilled labour. The military themselves may be able to get away with training their own personelle. (Or maybe not. It depends upon the scope of skills needed.) Military contractors would have a much harder time. So it is an issue on at least one end, and maybe both.