Clearly, now is the the time to switch to an all-Microsoft business solution! It is clearly the less expensive alternative to dangerous Free Software. But seriously, I don’t understand how anyone can, in good conscience, sell a product that features a new, extremely pervasive security vulnerability every two weeks. Try this on for size: the most recent vulnerability (described in the first link above) affects a portion of the operating system that is INSTRUMENTAL IN DELIVERING THE BUG-FIX TO THE CONSUMER. Furthermore, it is in the technology Microsoft has attempted to center their operating system around. Internet Explorer is included with every single copy of windows sold since 1995, and there is no way to avoid using it. Most of the operating system is constructed in this manner.
What this means is that even if your particular use of the operating system doesn’t include web-browsing, or DCOM, or any other pre-installed “feature” of the operating system, you still are vulnerable to attack on those particular features.
In my Software Testing class, a bug is defined, among other things, as “Any function the product performs outside of the specification of the user’s needs.” A calculator that does addition and subtraction, in spite of the fact that the customer requested only addition capabilities, contains a bug. An operating system that includes a web browser — even though the user only needs it to serve as, say, a code repository — contains a bug. Not only does the operating system contain this unnecessary fluff, but at any given moment Windows calls components of Internet Explorer to perform some function or another.
You simply can’t avoid running this vulnerable piece of software — you HAVE to update it, even if you never click on the internet explorer icon.