A plant, animal, human society, or product may reduplicate prolifically so long as it is alone. But it may not survive competition from its own kind. This suggests that Microsoft Windows will die as its faults come to outweigh its virtues.
As Den Beste said, in any ecology, a period of non-competitive growth comes first. This period lasts so long as unfilled space remains unfilled. For plants and animals, `space' means niches, for businesses, it means markets. For humans it means empty land suitable for colonization. In this period, virtue is the deciding factor (virtue meaning `most fitted to the environment'). Those that do best expand the fastest.
But the deciding capability, the `limiting factor', changes when all niches are filled. Then, lack of faults becomes key. In a `full' ecology, or `saturated' market, a plant, animal, human society, or product will be able to reproduce only so long as it can survive competition with others of its own kind.
With competition from similar entities, the ecosystem becomes zero-sum.
Consider the initial human settlement of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Prolific and peaceful humans range widely over an empty territory. They cooperate with each other. But when these people meet thugs, they will be killed, unless they learn to kill.
`Empty territory' means, of course, `empty' at the level of the ingressing humans' technological and pathological capabilities. Thus, in the 1500s, the Spanish conquered what is now called `Latin America'. The Spanish had steel and their soldiers knew about deceit and double-dealing. The first European settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, found that before they arrived in 1621, most of the indigenous people had died. The urban Europeans were accustomed to these diseases. Some of their children died; but other European children fell ill, recovered, and enjoyed immunity as adults.
Put simply, whether it be a plant, and animal, a human society, or a commercial product, an entity with a great virtue may do well so long at it does not have to compete with others of its own kind. But when it does compete, if its virtue has nothing to do with intra-species survival, it and its kind will die.
This raises a question about contemporary computer operating systems and associated applications: which will survive? Will the built-in features of operating systems offered by Microsoft disable it against competitors such as GNU/Linux? In Microsoft Windows, most, perhaps all, mail readers automatically execute code in email messages they receive. This was a virtue when few used the Microsoft mail readers. It made it easier for a reader to study a `live' spreadsheet that another had written.
But now the `niche' or market for electronic mail readers is full. The former feature provides a simple path for those who wish to send dangerous code to others. Worse, many who run Microsoft Windows, run it in `system administrator' mode. Eventually, for some versions of the operating system, that is the default mode. This means the people who run the computers not only open their personal portion of the computer to attack, they open the whole computer to attack.
As far as I know, only one of the GNU/Linux distributions, Linspire, defaults to enabling a regular user to operate with `super user' privilege. That distribution need not do so. And, in any event, as far as I know, their suggested email reader does not automatically execute binaries that come as email.
If the `differing virtues' thesis is true, then the Microsoft Corporation is in the same situation as a plant that once spread rapidly because of its good fit within an empty niche, but now has faults that become dangerous as it competes with others of the same kind.
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