The other point, of course, is that the number of vulnerabilities is a very crude measuring stick. For example, how critical are those software holes? Was the vendor able to respond quickly with patches? Microsoft is recognized as an industry leader in its efforts to respond to vulnerabilities in its products; security researchers generally give Apple and Oracle lower marks in their response times.
The connection between researchers' "interest" levels and the numbers of vulnerabilities they find limits any effort to derive meaning from these numbers -- beyond the indisputable fact that all the major software vendors that Secunia tracks have been unable to reduce the number of holes discovered in software. In fact, as Secunia notes in its report, the number of vulnerabilities found in the products of the top-ranked vendors increased between 136 percent and 440 percent between 2005 and 2010. That's a statistic that nobody will be bragging about any time soon.
Paul F. Roberts is a Senior Analyst at The 451 Group.
This article, "Microsoft: Apple takes the vulnerability crown," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.