MyDoom

You've probably heard of "MyDoom" by now. A recent message from Dave Farber's Interesting People list got me thinking about it:

• Monetary losses to my company, which uses Linux*, caused by MyDoom: $1 (for my time to delete copies of MyDoom from my inbox)
• Monetary losses to information technology firms using Windows: $38,500,000,000 (overtime payments, contingency outsourcing, loss of business, bandwidth clogging, productivity erosion, management time reallocation, cost of recovery and software upgrades)
• Seeing SCO taken offline: priceless

* In all fairness, my company does have one employee who runs Apple OS X instead of Linux, but we let it slide because he's still young.