inamerrata

Oh, the double entendres. Anyway, this Infoworld article quotes Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft’s antispam technology and strategy:

“It won’t surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam,” he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware and other costs. Loss of productivity is not factored in, Hamlin said.

…

“An occasional spam might show up, but it is kind of noise and you will just delete it. Spam [fighting] will evolve into a measure-countermeasure cycle similar to the antivirus landscape,” he said.

No offense, but the antivirus landscape is abhorrent and a symptom of shoddy security measures in common systems, and $18 billion dollars of market friction isn’t something that should be tolerated. For reference, 35c per year, by the population of America is around $.07 billion USD, or per person, $60 USD versus 22 US cents wasted per year.