by , 1:30 PM EDT, August 25th, 2004
Walt Mossberg has published part four of his five part interview with Steve Jobs. The interview took place earlier this summer during the "D: all things digital" technology conference, and in this installment, Mr. Jobs talks about issues such as the lack of viruses in Mac OS X, whether or not it's worth it for Apple to tackle the Enterprise market, and politics. From the interview:
Mossberg: I know you don't like to brag about this because you don't want to have a red flag in front of the virus writers, but there has basically not been a successful virus in a while that replicates on OS X.
Jobs: There hasn't been in practice. In theory, we got a pretty serious situation the last few weeks, for which we're actually putting out an update probably this afternoon. I've got some stats for you if you want them. I copied these down because I thought you might ask. In Mac OS X's history -- four and a half years -- we've had 43 security updates fixing security issues, but only 2% of them were critical. In Windows XP, which has been around for less time, they've had 77 security updates but 66% of them were critical in terms of the industry's nomenclature. So we've had very, very few critical issues.
[...]
Mossberg: But [Dell sells] a lot of servers, and you don't. It is worth continuing to try and invest in?
Jobs: Sure. We're very lucky; we've got a successful, profitable business. We innovated our way through the downturn, and we have a lot of engineering groups doing some really fun stuff, and we've got almost $5 billion in cash in the bank and no debt. So we have the resources to do a few of these things and keep at them to see if we can do the job.
There is more in the full interview, including the fact that Mr. Jobs doesn't want to advertise Mac OS X's lack of viruses in order to not make the OS more of a target, some clarification on what Steve Jobs is doing for the John Kerry campaign (nothing at all, at the time of the interview), Pixar's success with Finding Nemo, and much more. We recommend it as a very, very interesting read.