There's Windows Vista, and there's the rest. Microsoft's perspective was eloquently made public at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 in Houston, Texas, on July 10, 2008. The Redmond company claims nothing less than that Windows Vista is superior to Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, to all distributions of Linux, and to the entire environment of open source solutions, in terms of security. Microsoft has never been shy at hinting of the superiority of its latest Windows client compared to rival operating systems. The OS vulnerability measuring games performed by Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group is by now an integral part of the company's culture, and marketing arsenal. But this time, none other than Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer has come out and said it loud and clear.

"Vista is the most secure product in the history of operating systems on a desktop. It is more secure today than Apple Leopard, or XP, or Linux, or open source," Turner stated (emphasis added). In addition to Jones' many Vista vs. XP vs. Linux vs. OS X vulnerability comparisons, Microsoft has the data collected from the Malicious Software Removal Tool and centralized in the April 2008 version of the Security Intelligence Report.

In his latest comparison, Jones indicated that Vista was impacted by less vulnerabilities than Windows XP SP2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client), Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS (V. 4), Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Desktop, Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Apple Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). At the same time, in the January - June 2007 Security Intelligence Report, Microsoft revealed that the MSRT had cleaned 60.5% fewer Vista-based machines compared to XP SP2 computers, 44% fewer than Windows 2000 SP4 and 77% fewer than Windows Server 2003.

"We built this product to engineer in security on the front end, not as a service pack. As a result of that, we tightened down things like user account controls. Yes, it required a lot of compatibility upgrades and fixes, but you know what, it's important that you understand the progress, and you're able to articulate that, and fewer patching is what all customers want, and there's a cost savings there. Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 delivers that," Turner added.