We have multiple other methods in place for tracking network traffic and nothing unexpected is going out that I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine we would be directed from the highest levels to standardize on MS products like we have been either if they were secretly transmitting information from behind our perimeter to outside parties. With all respect you’ll have to come up with some other evidence before I’ll believe it’s happening, because my experience is to the contrary. Windows systems can be secured just as good as any other O/S with the right people managing them, the users well trained and operating without admin privileges, etc, just as any other operating system is insecure without proper setup/management and being controlled by untrained users.
I’ve been here since everything was VMS and many flavors of Unix, but we’ve migrated almost everything to Windows and things have never run better. The programmers (who now like to be called “developers” instead LOL) really seem to like the Microsoft programming tools better too, we used to do lots of Java based programming and run the webservers on Sun and databases on Oracle, but it’s all Microsoft now and there’s not a person here who’d like to change back. Competition for Microsoft is good, but I’d just prefer it be American owned companies and not based on free clones from Europe or US socialists, which is how I view Linux.
There I have to agree. C# is a pleasure to work with, and VS 2005 is pretty good. Some things in the .NET framework still annoy me, but the number of annoyances is much less that what I had in Java or other platforms.
If you're using SUS, you probably didn't notice Windows contacting the update service and downloading and installing updates despite the user having set preferences not to do so. And watch out for anything related to DRM -- it's not unexpected if you've had your lawyers read the EULA, but Microsoft reserves the right to do whatever it wants (unwanted network traffic, software updates, deleting your installed software) in relation to the DRM system.