Evident.io founder and CEO Tim Prendergast wondered on Twitter why other cloud service providers aren’t taking marketing advantage of the Xen vulnerability that lead Amazon and Rackspace to reboot a large number of cloud instances over a few-day period. Digital Ocean, Azure, and Google Compute Engine all use other hypervisors, so isn’t this an opportunity for them to brag about their security? Amazon is the clear market leader, so pointing out this vulnerability is a great differentiator.

Except that it isn’t. It’s a matter of chance that Xen is The hypervisor facing an apparently serious and soon-to-be-public exploit. Next week it could be Mircosoft’s Hyper-V. Imagine the PR nightmare if Microsoft bragged about how much more secure Azure is only to see a major exploit strike Hyper-V next week. It would be even worse if the exploit was active in the wild before patches could be applied.

“Choose us because of this Xen issue” is the cloud service provider equivalent of an airline running a “don’t fly those guys, they just had a plane crash” ad campaign. Just because your competition was unlucky this time, there’s no guarantee that you won’t be the lower next time.

I’m all for companies touting legitimate security features. Amazon’s handling of this incident seems pretty good, and I think they generally do a good job of giving users the ability to secure their environment. That doesn’t mean someone can’t come along and do it better. If there’s anything 2014 has taught us, it’s that we have a long road ahead of us when it comes to the security of computing.

It’s to the credit of Amazon’s competition that they’ve remained silent. It shows a great degree of professionalism. Digital Ocean’s Chief Technology Evangelist John Edgar had the best explanation for the silence: “because we’re not assholes mostly.”