Novell's other product lines make a strong security story, if only Novell would tell it. Novell's modular authentication and single sign-on products are already good, and getting better. Whether or not you think Microsoft has a monopoly, the drawback to one company's having 90 percent of a product market is that when there's a problem, it affects 90 percent of the global market. During the last few years, Microsoft's operating systems and desktop suites have compiled a record of relatively poor security. Although it's true that Microsoft is getting better about delivering patches and service releases, it's obvious that security has taken a back seat to pushing products out the door.
Many customers agree that something has to change.
A number of people from Microsoft have been trying to convince me that Office XP, Windows XP, and Whistler servers are going to be tougher than anything the company has released before. They point to the security testing these new releases are undergoing, which involves running all known attacks against test builds. Personally, I'm skeptical about what that's going to prove. When Microsoft tests against all known attacks, it's just making sure that it hasn't broken the fixes for existing bugs in Office and Windows. It seems to me that this kind of testing is more like due diligence, or what they should be doing anyway.