In an interview with Check Point’s CEO.
Why do you think it’s been so challenging for Microsoft to get its arms around security?
My view, as a technologist, is very simple. Go back 20 years or so, in terms of the operating system. There were Unix and VMS. Unix was extremely simple, extremely powerful and easy to master. You could have gone to the Unix kernel and made changes and introduced new applications. Every Unix programmer knew all the APIs (application user interfaces), because they were very simple.
The VMS approach was the opposite. Everything you wanted to do was available there. It was very, very powerful but extremely complicated. Everything was a big bureaucracy. For everything you wanted to do, you needed to read 50 pages or 100 pages of manuals to learn how to do it. Microsoft historically picked the VMS approach. It actually hired the same guy who was in charge of VMS development.