In article , "John
Rumm" says...
Alan wrote:

Why do Microsoft products need so many security updates? Surely after 10
years of development simple programs such as OE and IE should be shipped
free of bugs?

History mostly. MS dis not "get" the internet until the late 90's, at
which point the saw it as a threat (hence the browser wars etc).

And the great flop that was MSN - as so often happens Microsoft took
someone else's idea and tweaked it to make it proprietary, but in this
case the embrace and extend strategy fell flat.

Microsoft negotiated a deal with the developers of the Mosaic web
browser so they could use the code for Internet Explorer and would pay a
royalty on its sales - of course they gave IE away, so the Mosaic
developers got nothing. Since Netscape (which was also produced by some
Mosaic developers) ceased to be a major force in the browser market,
Microsoft has done very little innovative development on IE, and
previous "enhancements" like ActiveX have proved to be something of a
liability as far as security is concerned.