Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

Gartner, a technology research company, predicted that Microsoft Windows 7 will become the leading operating system by the end of 2011 with a 42% market share, while 94% of all new computers shipped this year will have Windows 7.  Gartner has forecast that Windows 7 will be the final Microsoft operating system to be deployed through a pan-corporate migration with other organizations opting for different client computing architectures for personal computers with Windows in the future as well as a continued shift towards cloud computing and virtualization over the next 5 years to provide Windows in this fashion to computer users.

Gartner also forecast an increase in market share for Mac computers to 4.5% in 2011 with a further increase to 5.2% of new computers sold in 2015. The company also emphasized the importance of increasing IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 as helping to spread the increase in usage of Windows 7, excepting Western Europe on account of economic insecurity, certain African and Middle Eastern countries due to political instability, and Japan on account of economic stagnation following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

On the issue of operating system security, Alex Stamos, a security expert with iSec Partners, told the recent Black Hat Conference that the Mac OS X is more vulnerable than Windows 7 in terms of network attacks. Smaller market share does not necessarily make Mac computers less of a target as Stamos noted that Mac OS X server services generally have weak or broken authentication tools. However, the latest Mac OS X release, named Lion, permits the creation of a “sandbox” to isolate malware. Apple’s iPhone and iPad already use a safer, sandboxing framework.

Both Windows and OS X systems employ address space layout randomization (ASLR) (that randomly moves the locations of key data areas, thereby increasing the difficulty of hackers to predict those locations) and data execution prevention (DEP) (with the intention of stopping an application from executing code within a non-executable memory area).