New, security enchanced product!
The only viruses "in the wild" for Mac OS X are Microsoft Word macro viruses. That's pretty significant - that a popular user operating system that is 5 years old (and has roots that are decades old) only has viruses because of a single Microsoft application is worth considering.
In fact, that a word processor could ever be a security risk is such a messed up concept, and I've always hated the way Word is built because of this. It's a damn Word Processor, yet the scripting language has access to the window server and even the filesystem! In any case, this is just one example of where Word is simply too complex for its own good. Everyone appears to use it, I guess initially because it does everything, but I *honestly* do not know anyone (from work, uni and friends) that's relies on a feature of Word that doesn't appear in Appleworks.
That's precisely what software bloat is. Word is far too complex for its own good. The dialog system is an absolute minefield. Just to turn off the all the "auto-screw-things-up-for-me" features requires navigating far too many menus and dialogs. And what's the answer to reducing the complexity? Hiding some of the menu items, in a seemingly random manner! So every time I go to look for a command, none of my familar commands are guaranteed to be in a predictable place, and the command I'm looking for may be hidden behind those bloody chevrons. Searching for a command often requires a menu click, a linear search through a different subset of shown menu items, mousing to the bottom of the menu, clicking the chevron, mousing back up and perfoming a brand new linear search through a new menu item subset!
Appleworks has had a perfectly good, much more user friendly, macroing system for yonks. And it is nowhere near a security risk! The apologists will say Word is not a security risk, because the holes have been "fixed". Disabling macros by default is *not* a fix!! It's a bad bandaid. Now everytime I open a document which I created a couple of simple macros for, it warns me about "security risks" and offers to turn the macros off! What a bloody hassle. Even worse when I open someone else's document and the warning again appears. How do I know what they do or whether I should enable them or not?
This very concept is appallingly echoed in Outlook. It was marketed as having "great" features like auto-execution of executables, auto rendering of linked HTML data, etc. Of course, that was a blindingly large security hole, so the next "great" release of Outlook had "new", "amazing" security features! Know what these features were? Turning off all the shit that shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Unnecessary bloat.
I'll stop soon, but it is the same with personal firewalls. Why the hell would you ever need to stop connections to your own machine? If your machine is accepting connections, then surely you want those connections? If not, you would never had started accepting connections in the first place right? Not so with Windows of course.