Computer Viruses Cost Companies $13.2 Billion... We Think

from the it's-a-pretty-definite-guestimate dept

I have lots of problems with any study that figures out a "hypothetical" loss. I love to trash studies that suggest how much mp3 trading "costs" the music industry - or how much software piracy costs the industry when they naturally assume that every traded file or copies software would have resulted in a sale otherwise (this is bad economics and bad methodology in general). Now, here's a study that tries to tell us how much computer viruses cost companies last year. The article (from the Register) challenging the study's writers is pretty funny. They even get a VP at the company who wrote the study to curse, saying that his critics (and sometimes customers) are "full of shit". Yet, he won't admit that his company's methodology is something of a "guestimate". They make an awful lot of assumptions, and do very little to see if the numbers they are coming up with make any sense. Yet another useless study that never should have been written.

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