As an experiment, Steve Knopper bought a Dell computer and left it unprotected — and clicked on every dubious link he could find. He kept a diary. Here are the last few days.

Day 10: I download Kazaa, search for .xxx, .gif, .rar, .pif, and .exe files, and open everything. My desktop is soon stuffed with pornography, MP3s in Arabic, and pirated copies of Tomb Raider. Within minutes, Explorer has a grand mal seizure – 95 pop-ups and innumerable error messages. Hah!

Day 11: Incredibly, the Dell boots up. I’ve gotten some strange attachments that Yahoo, Outlook, and Eudora won’t let me open. I try copying some from my regular computer to the Dell using an external drive. Nothing.

Day 12: Upon firing up the computer, I get six Internet Explorer pop-ups, one WhenUWin Sweepstakes, and one “The Best Offers.” McAfee VirusScan says I have 25 potentially unwanted files, including W32/Netsky.q@MM!zip and two other viruses. SaferScan finds 1,002 porn files on my hard drive, and my Yahoo Mail inbox has 200 brand-new messages with subject lines like “Tired of dating games?”

Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.

It was a Windows machine, you understand.

From Bob Cringeley…

Last week, a Microsoft data security guru suggested at a conference that corporate and government users would be wise to come up with automated processes to wipe clean hard drives and reinstall operating systems and applications periodically as a way to deal with malware infestations. What Microsoft is talking about is a utility from SysInternals, a company that makes simply awesome tools.

The crying shame of this whole story is that Microsoft has given up on Windows security. They have no internal expertise to solve this problem among their 60,000-plus employees, and they apparently have no interest in looking outside for help. I know any number of experts who could give Microsoft some very good guidance on what is needed to fix and secure Windows. There are very good developers Microsoft could call upon to help them. But no, their answer is to rebuild your system every few days and start over. Will Vista be any better?

I don’t think so.

Hmmm… Is this really the advice corporate customers are being given about how to make sure their Windows installations are secure?

… itself! Here’s an insightful essay on Redmond’s growing problem. Extract:

It is, admittedly, a cliché, but Microsoft is clearly a victim of its own staggering success. What they’ve done best, historically, is kill and/or neuter their competitors. That’s why they’re gearing up for a fight against Google; Microsoft, as a company, defines itself by its rivalries. They relegated early PC peers like WordPerfect, Lotus, and Borland to relative obscurity; then, famously, they outright obliterated Netscape.

In the ’90s, to sell copies of Word, they needed to beat WordPerfect, and they did; to sell Excel, they needed to beat Lotus 1-2-3. Now, though, to sell new copies of Microsoft Office, they need to beat older copies of Microsoft Office. Hence the much-maligned ads in which Microsoft casts their own users as dinosaurs simply because they haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Office.

Most of the criticism of these ads revolves around the fact that it’s a bad idea to insult your own customers. But what I found interesting about them is the tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft’s strongest competitor in today’s office software market isn’t OpenOffice, or any other competing suite from another company, but rather the Microsoft of a decade ago.

The problem with Google, as an “enemy” for Microsoft, is that Google is even less of a direct rival to Microsoft than Apple is. Microsoft sells software. Google does not sell software. The only way for Microsoft to “beat” Google is for one of the two companies to enter the other one’s market. Google doesn’t seem the least bit interested in selling operating systems or office software — and even if they do eventually enter those markets, it would likely be with software they give away in order to generate advertising revenue. Microsoft’s previous corporate rivals were companies that helped Microsoft focus on its core competency: selling and developing PC software. Obsessing about Google draws them away from that focus…

Link via Nicholas Carr.

From a nice column by Bob Cringeley…

Here’s a question I hope Bill Gates has asked himself: “What’s the likelihood that 10 years from now Microsoft will have 70-plus percent market share in; a) television software, and; b) mobile phone software?”

In both cases the odds are very much against Microsoft, yet Microsoft’s theory of business absolutely requires that it succeed spectacularly on at least one of these platforms and preferably both.

So the company is in crisis and that crisis comes down to every one of those five stages of dealing with death as defined originally in 1969 by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Microsoft has been in denial for most of the five years and $5 billion of Longhorn/Vista. They have been angry this entire time, too, at an establishment that just doesn’t seem to understand the fragility of their empire and how breaking a few laws and destroying a few competitors is simply the price of survival at the top — the price of American greatness. Microsoft has been bargaining for the past two-three years as it settles its debts to society, pretends to reform, and tries to figure a way out of its current mess. Depression has really hit Redmond in the last year and will continue to grow until well into the eventual period of acceptance, which has not yet begun.

But what would acceptance even mean for Microsoft? Well, it certainly isn’t the acceptance of corporate death. It’s the acceptance of the death of its business theory, which is unsustainable since it requires complete triumph, which is nearly impossible. That Microsoft did it once before was luck and a willingness to bargain with the Devil. But now luck is gone, leaving only the Devil, and that’s not enough. Microsoft’s entire theory of business must die and the essence of its current crisis is that the company hasn’t yet realized or accepted that fact, and so it isn’t yet in a position where it can even envision a successor theory…

Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley…

A research note released this week from Gartner predicts that Microsoft will miss its end-of-year ship date for Windows Vista. “Microsoft’s track record is clear; it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases,” the firm wrote. “We don’t expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least 2Q07, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2.” According to Gartner, Microsoft will likely need at least nine months to clean up and fix bugs found in Vista after the Beta 2 release. Now, historically Microsoft has missed the ship date of most every OS it’s produced, so it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to intuit that it may miss Vista’s latest ship date as well, especially since it’s been slipping almost since the day it was set.

Microsoft says:

“We respectfully disagree with Gartner’s views around timing of the final delivery of Windows Vista,” a Microsoft spokesman told CNET News. “We remain on track to deliver Windows Vista Beta 2 in the second quarter and to deliver the final product to volume-license customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007.”

So now you know. Or not, as the case may be.