Steve Jobs Speaks On Viruses, Politics, Enterprise

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 itis worth it for Apple to tackle the Enterprise market, and politics. From the interview:

Mossberg: I know you donit like to brag about this because you donit 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 hasnit been in practice. In theory, we got a pretty serious situation the last few weeks, for which weire actually putting out an update probably this afternoon. Iive got some stats for you if you want them. I copied these down because I thought you might ask. In Mac OS Xis history -- four and a half years -- weive had 43 security updates fixing security issues, but only 2% of them were critical. In Windows XP, which has been around for less time, theyive had 77 security updates but 66% of them were critical in terms of the industryis nomenclature. So weive had very, very few critical issues.

[...]

Mossberg: But [Dell sells] a lot of servers, and you donit. It is worth continuing to try and invest in?

Jobs: Sure. Weire very lucky; weive 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 weive 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 doesnit want to advertise Mac OS Xis 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), Pixaris success with Finding Nemo, and much more. We recommend it as a very, very interesting read.