Just reading David Winer’s blog post saying it did.

In installations, that’s clearly not true. In business use, that’s clearly not true. In mindshare…it may well be true. And Apple is supreme in single-company computer sales…but are moving out of that business, it seems to me.

But I don’t want to talk about that.

What I want to talk about is his assertion that malware was a nightmare in the Windows world and in fact drove the Mac win.

That’s just not my experience. I’ve had Windows computers at work the whole time he discusses, and windows computers at home since I first installed Windows 1 (to develop an application). I’ve had full-time (broadband) connected computers at home since 1996. And in all that time, the only virus infection I’ve seen is one Word macro virus that I got in a document sent me by a fellow Minicon committee member. That’s it.

I’ve mostly run an anti-virus program — but it’s never stopped anything (it has, very very occasionally, suggested that something I downloaded from a site I considered dodgy probably contained something bad; but these were all cases where I had deliberately downloaded it, and manually scanned it to make sure because I felt there was cause to worry).

I don’t click things totally at random.

And I mostly don’t go to dodgy sites in the first place. I’m not often looking for illegal software or content, for example.

Malware has had essentially no impact on my user experience. It’s simply not a factor.

I have no idea why my experience is so completely different from Dave Winer’s.

But it’s a bit interesting.

This entry was posted on 06-Mar-2013 at 17:13 and is filed under Computers, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: computer, mac, malware, virus, windows.