Windows Vista was, by any reckoning, late. One of the major reasons was that Microsoft was attempting to take its ageing code-base, much of which of course dates back to a time when personal computers were solitary creatures (my Windows 95 machine was quite shocked by the addition of a network card), tending to commune with each other little and sporadically, if at all. Baring the occasional infected floppy disk (which I never came across), one was pretty safe.
These days, of course, that kind of attitude just doesn’t cut it at all. But now it seems that Vista may be no more secure than XP. Of course, anyone can write a controversial report – it’s a way of getting good coverage in the press, and Microsoft themselves do it often. But one only has to scratch the very surface of the – admittedly lovely, perhaps, for those who like that sort of thing – user interface, to be left with the impression that not much has really changed underneath it all. I very much hope to be proved wrong.