You did illustrate my point. The original question was whether Linux was better and I was just trying to explain that we who have been in the business do not know exactly what Microsoft did, but they did it and at this point in time they are the prime target.

I take issue with those companies who dig into Microsoft for its security when they had the same opportunity to turn their os's and themselves into monopoly's but missed the boat. It wasn't that they weren't/aren't all trying. Therefore, if you replace Microsoft with Sun/IBM/HP/RedHat and assuming the same vigor to be a monopoly, you would still have a company in the same situation and a technical community questioning "Is one better than the other..."

By no means do I think Windows is technically the best OS by any measure.

"Better" is a tough nut to crack. I agree that technical merits are not used to judge the os's anymore.Its probably because such a discussion would be to arcane for many if not somewhat impractical. It would be impractical because we don't have a homogenous technical environment within which we work. If you want "Better" then you would likely have to purchase every piece of your infrastructure from one vendor.