Macs rule at two security conferences

Andrew Jaquith of Yankee Group recently attended two security conferences out in California, and did a little surveying of the computer landscape there. His stats are quite telling, particularly the one that said that Macs made up 55% of all computers at the general session, and that 90% of those were less than a year old. Even at the Microsoft-sponsored session on CardSpace, 42% of the computers there were Macs.

All I can say is that this is a dramatically different environment than when I was covering security from 1996 to 1998. At that time, I was lugging around my Forrester-issued IBM Thinkpad, and there were approximately zero Apple computers at big security conferences. While we hear all the time assertions that Windows computers can be just as secure as Mac OS X ones, security professionals seem to be voting otherwise with their wallets. Sounds to me like the recent observation that Apple has captured 10% of the total US retail notebook shipments in March may be undercounting the cumulative numbers of Windows switchers.

Oh, one little bit of 10-year-old inside baseball that may or may not still be true today. That one guy counted in Andrew's post as being from the "Department of Defense"? That used to typically be the guy representing the National Security Agency (NSA, or as we used to call them, No Such Agency). The CIA guys who attend security conferences have badges that read "US Government".

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