No, Microsoft is no shit... but it does not offer very secure products. Get over it! MS's customer base is, in general, not very tech savvy. Also, I believe it

No, Microsoft is no shit... but it does not offer very secure products. Get over it! MS's customer base is, in general, not very tech savvy. Also, I believe it is not inaccurate to say that they see computers as "magic". You perform the correct "incantation" and the magic just "works". So, the problem is not only that they do not value security highly enough; they assign high value to a number of features that makes security harder. Think in all the APIs available to 3r party software to make fancier applications (that inter-operate with one another). Think backwards compatibility. Think seemly smooth operation. What happens with this situation, is that the brilliant developers at Microsoft get a bunch of conflicting requirements, and (strong???) incentives to compromise in those that do not add to the bottom line. Those brilliant guys will burn themselves creating overly complicated solutions that are bond to be wrong in very obscure ways. And this so, even granting the assumption that they will make an honest effort to provide the best possible security given the constrains mentioned before. Do they care about security? Absolutely, otherwise they would've gone out of business long ago. Is security their top priority? Not really. Are there any better options, security-wise, than Microsoft? I'd bet pennies to dollars; specially if those competitors do not fear trashing the intuitiveness of their systems and making a hell of a learning curve to new users. An most of the time, it is OK. Most people does not have important enough information at their computers. They can afford the risks and may decide the inconveniences to protect their systems are not worth the effort. But, as IT professionals, it is highly irresponsible not to let them know what they are getting into.