In a democracy, the real problem is voters. In markets, the real problem is the customers. In this case, it seems to be both. I'm making a guess here that the

In a democracy, the real problem is voters. In markets, the real problem is the customers. In this case, it seems to be both. I'm making a guess here that the real issue is that customers don't understand security and won't pay for it. They do understand that security is inconvenient and punish MS for implementing inconvenient features. That would explain the behaviour seen around the release of Vista - a company learning that security might be important to their CEO and dev team, but they will get financially punished for prioritising it so the bean counters step in and overrule that funny business on behalf of the customers. I'd go further and say that the correct thing to do here is to train government purchasing officers on security and punish them for buying insecure software. This "Microsoft has the market buttoned up due to a few key strengths" business in the article shows that too. If the government really understood its own needs, it could organise for someone else to build software that meets them. From their perspective Libreoffice and MS Office might be incomparable, but there is no argument that technically they are very similar. Business needs could be met too if someone put some budget into it for a few years and it isn't that hard. The issue here is entirely that government contracts won't move around based on real security concerns.