“I think what gets overlooked most of the time is that the reason Windows has been so targeted for years is because it is the most common OS being used.”
Some people overlook it, some people put too much stock into it.
Operating Systems (and note that this article is about vendors of software not the OS itself) are like any other complex engineered product.
If everyone in the world drove a Yugo except 5% that drove a Humvee would the lower body count in Humvees be due to the number or the engineering? or, likely, Both.
There have been viruses produced for cell phones that have a user base of less than 200K people. Also the Base of OSX is BSD which happens to run the DNS servers the make the web work (not Apples Darwin BSD but a BSD variant) so hacking *1* particular BSD server could be the mother of all hijacks.
Correct. That's why we have to look at even playing fields like pwn2own where OSX was the first one hacked for the past 3 years. And last year OSX gave read and write acess whereas windows only gave up read access. Both are serious but there's no doubt that read/write is much worse than just read.
We'll never settle the issue between how many viruses are due to install base so let's focus on common ground tests.