Microsoft plus Adobe: Do the math

Rumors of a possible merger force us to consider how Microsoft and Adobe's combined awesomeness would add up

I was taken aback by the New York Times report about Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayen's hour-long meeting. The stock market certainly noticed as well, with Adobe shares rocketing upward on Thursday afternoon.

If Microsoft and Adobe were to join forces, the combined juggernaut could dominate many facets of computerdom as we know it. Consider the characteristics they have in common.

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Prodigious patches
Earlier this week, Adobe issued a monster fix for Reader, plugging 23 independently identified security holes in one go-round.

Next week, Microsoft promises to release 16 brand-new Security Bulletins covering 49 separate security shortcomings.

Toss in an Adobe Flash patch rollout and it's not difficult for underworked sys admins to envision a future Microdobe Patch Tuesday with a hundred holes patched in one day. Imagine the economies of scale!

With Microsoft and Adobe's combined patching expertise, a unified patching strategy could get us patches that work right the first time. No more patches of patches of patches. No machines that refuse to reboot after a bad patch. No patches that introduce more security holes than they plug. Oh. Wait a second. We're talking Microsoft and Adobe, aren't we? Never mind.

Well-honed attack vectors
At one point -- at least by my dead reckoning -- Internet Explorer 6 was responsible for more infected PCs than any other piece of software in computing history. Between IE6 and ActiveX attack vectors, malware writers experienced years of relatively unhindered access to the innards of PCs. Vast droves of them.