I get what you are saying, and fundamentally it is a social/education vector. However there are easy, obvious things that Microsoft can do to make this better.

I get what you are saying, and fundamentally it is a social/education vector. However there are easy, obvious things that Microsoft can do to make this better. Off the top of my head, macro execution shouldn't be a boolean choice. Don't let Macros modify the file system or connect the network, without additional prompts/warnings. Default to not allowing these at all, and the user can't just click a "OK" dialog to start allow it. Bury that setting deep in Control Panel. OS X/HFS+ has an interesting feature of using meta data to tell where files came from. You get security prompts even days later when doing certain actions with files downloaded from the Internet. Word/Office could act differently with Macros based on whether this file was an email attachment or downloaded vs. a local file the user created. When enabling VBA scripts, they could be run in a sandbox for a few seconds to see what it modifies on the system. Yes, there are ways around this, but lets raise the bar some.