Inforworld asks — and answers, in detail — “Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?“

The answer is pretty clear (yes), but the reasons why are enlightening, even for the not enormously technical. Simply put, OS X was designed to be secure and multiuser from the ground up (based as it is on Unix). Windows views those bits as afterthoughts, and performs accordingly. Attempts to secure Windows without a ground-up redesign are pretty much doomed to fail, as we’ve seen. Apple, with its much smaller market share, has made enormous strides in hardware and software by being unafraid of dragging their customers through potentially rocky transitions: ten years ago, they moved from Motorola chips to PowerPC chips to achieve better performance, and it worked well. Five years ago they introduced an entirely new, only sort-of backward-compatible OS, but have still managed the transition fine (modulo some holdouts). Now they’re changing chips again, from PowerPC (whose growth and development has become moribund) to Intel, and by all accounts that’s going pretty well, too.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has chained itself to the altar of backward-compatibility forever, which in turn means it’s held back by design decisions made before Michael Jackson got creepy.