A recent article by Mark Jones in InfoWorld http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/11/19/011119hnmssecure.xml?1119m npm leads me to believe that Microsoft is finally waking up to the need for better security in its business and consumer products. However, I disagree with that the real issue is privacy. The real issues are security, privacy, integrity, and reliability. Software should do what it's MARKETING LITERATURE and user documentation describes it as doing. If someone buys software to send and receive email, word processing or or electronic publishing that is what it should do (by default). Building into Microsoft's software extra "bells and whistles" or poorly documented "backdoors" such as the ability to execute an outside partie's code in attachments or macros is irresponsible and an invitation to outsiders to launch malicious attacks on Microsoft customers. Stating that "People errors are the bulk of the problem with [security] errors today." is just an attempt to shift blame and shirk responsibility. This is like shister lawers building loopholes for themselves into the small print. Or a hardware store selling high explosives to an unqualified individual and disclaiming responsibility because the individual lit the fuse. If Microsoft wants to "convince people that Microsoft products are trustworthy." Microsoft must first demonstrate that the company and its products can be trusted. A company earns trust by competing fairly and establishing an environment where first to market is less important than most trusted on the market. Building trusted software starts by convincing Microsoft managers and software developers to place security, privacy, integrity, and reliability first. Stop shipping products that haven't been tested. Stop shipping products that invisibly report information about a user's system back to Microsoft. Microsoft products are full of problems like: buffer overruns, unchecked return status, undetected & unhandled over/underflow, and pointer arithmetic. Many of these problems could be solved by using a programming language designed to build reliable systems, e.g., Ada. All of these problems could be solved by good "software engineering" and "responsible management." Rush Kester Software Systems Engineer Speaking for myself