Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, has released a new report which concludes that Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows Vista is more secure than its predecessor, Windows XP.

Jones has used as criteria of evaluation the number pf vulnerabilities fixed, security updates and patch event which were issued by Microsoft during the first year since the official launch of Windows Vista for businesses.

According to his findings, Windows Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor.

Analysis of security updates also shows that Microsoft improvements to the security update process and development process have reduced the impact of security updates to Windows administrators significantly compared to Windows XP.

For example, Jones counted only 17 security bulletins and patches affecting Vista in its first year of existence. Microsoft issued 30 such bulletins for Windows XP in its first year.

Also, Jones compared Windows Vista with other operating systems. He said in its report that the number of vulnerabilities fixed in Mac OS X and in Linux-based operating systems was higher in their first years.

For example there were 360 vulnerabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation, 224 in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and 116 in Mac OS X 10.4.

In the end of his report, Jones admitted that the figures do not indicate which operating system is "more secure" than the others. He noted that are also other factors involved in assessing the security of an operating system such as software quality, administrative controls, physical controls and other issues.

Microsoft has wanted to lose its label of unsafe OS so badly, acquired through Windows 95 and Windows 98, that it invested heavily in security, purchasing companies and products and even starting a bit of a conflict with established producers such as McAfee and Symantec.

Earlier this week, Microsoft said in its earnings conference call that since Windows Vista became generally available one year ago, Microsoft’s Client business has grown over 20% on average and sales of Windows Vista have surpassed 100 million licenses.