“I saw what Bill Gates had to say in a recent Newsweek interview about the Mac as compared to Vista,” Scott Granneman reports for SecurityFocus.

Gates in Newsweek: I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

MacDailyNews Note: Please see related MacDailyNews article: Bill Gates has lost his mind: calls Apple liars, copiers; slams Mac OS X security vs. Windows – February 02, 2007

Granneman reports, “My reaction, like most knowledgeable people who read this, was open-mouthed astonishment. Now, either Bill is heavily drugged and delusional, which I don’t believe, or he’s just completely ignorant, which I also discount, or he knows exactly what he’s saying and has an ulterior motive. That’s my best guess.”

Granneman reports, “Bill Gates knows that he’s at best exaggerating and at worst completely lying through his teeth. So why’s he doing it? Because he also knows that Apple’s new ads are helping Macs to sell like hot cakes, and that security is a big reason why a lot of people are throwing up their hands in disgust at Windows and switching to Apple’s computers. Who reads Newsweek? Not computer pros, but Joe and Jane Computeruser, and Joe and Jane tend to believe what they read in the mainstream media when it comes to computers, especially when that nice, smart philanthropist Bill Gates is the one saying it. He’s Mr. Computer, after all, so he must be right!”

Granneman reports, “A few years ago, Steve Ballmer ranted about open source in the Chicago Sun-Times, bellowing that ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.’ This is obviously horsehockey, and it’s just as obvious that Ballmer knew that it was horsehockey, but he said it anyway knowing that many readers of the Chicago Sun-Times would believe what he said because he is a rich, important businessman. Bill Gates’ claim that ‘security guys break the Mac every single day’ is just as ludicrous, and just as calculated.”

“In both cases, fear is the string these two maestros are plucking. The ignorant will come away from reading the earlier interview believing that Linux is dangerous and will doom their companies, while the later interview may keep a few more people from switching to Mac OS because it’s getting broken into every single day,” Granneman reports. “Apple [also] uses fear to sell computers, but it’s a heck of a lot more accurate in what it both says and implies, while Microsoft’s leaders tend to nakedly push the buttons of fear willy-nilly, facts and reality be damned.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "BillH" for the heads up.]

Related articles:
Wow: Microsoft’s Windows Vista already hacked – February 09, 2007
Bill Gates unhinged with Apple envy; Microsoft on path to become high profile casualty – February 06, 2007
Bill Gates has lost his mind: calls Apple liars, copiers; slams Mac OS X security vs. Windows – February 02, 2007