There are 2 kinds of security: The first kind of security involves increasing the security for as many people and systems as you can. The second kind of secur

There are 2 kinds of security: The first kind of security involves increasing the security for as many people and systems as you can. The second kind of security involves making your numbers look good by saying "We don't support that any longer." Microsoft seems interested in the second kind. They are going to ditch support for widely used legacy systems, so they are not blamed when those systems get hacked. Microsoft should offer support every Microsoft product ever released that still has 1 million active users. Imagine Microsoft using a single Hyper-V install, then letting you run any Microsoft product that is commonly used for $5 to $25 each. That would pay for a lot of security and profit. Just firewalling the legacy systems in the way Cisco does with ACLs would greatly improve their security. A more comprehensive next-generation firewall would be better. Their software engineers could look at every likely vulnerability for their products, and offer one of several kinds of patches: (1) A firewall patch that makes such exploits unlikely to get through, (2) a patch to the hypervisor that inspects the VM and prevents or removes the exploit, or (3) a patch to the software itself that removes the vulnerability. These could work together, with the software itself detecting the problem and asking the hypervisor to do the cleanup. Using this combination of methods, Microsoft's engineers should be able to deal with every known exploit.