Ground Breaking Survey
As I am reliably and repeatedly informed at any time I quote statistics - 68% of all statistics are made up. Even with this valuable awareness drummed into me, occasionally a real doozy of a stat manages to raise my eyebrow or make me laugh. This ones from a survey of some crowd called ‘Bit9’ - bizarre name I know. Maybe it’s some clever play on our 8-bit encoded digital world. Buggered if I get it.
According to their survey 68 percent of respondents had software restrictions in place - but 45% found unauthorized software on more than HALF their PC’s.
I’m pretty sure they not talking about an innocent copy of mine sweeper!
If they’re right, basically a quarter of all the corporate PC’s out there are rife with doggy crap that could cause any manner of problems. One in Four. Loaded with any manner of spyware, malware, rubbish and this-and-that-ware.
Think about that for a moment. Imagine if a quarter of all the petrol in the world shipped had extra’s in it! Or one in four plates of food at the weekend ‘all you can eat’ buffet was off. Or poisoned. It boggles the mind. My thought is this - how on earth do we get away with it? As an industry.
It’s a monumental failure of basic engineering.
It makes my head numb to think about it. Still - they say worse things happen at sea. So although I can’t imagine how as an industry we get away with shipping some of the bug ridden, non functional crap that we do I can’t see anything changing anytime soon. In fact, if you flip the whole incredible argument upside down - the fact that a quarter of everything is bugged, polluted and poisoned, isn’t it an incredible feat of engineering that the whole rotten lot keeps working very day.
So do you see how important spin doctors are to our industry?
If you bother to read the survey, and I’ll admit I only skimmed the last half, you might have seen the other cool thing — the way Chinese spyware gets it’s very own category. Ransom-ware, trojans and malware appear all nationally and racially neutral, but now racial profiling has made it out of airports and into spyware. On that basis alone I think we can call the survey truly ground breaking.
Carlton
Comments
Post new comment