Another thing that Microsoft is announcing is that they began to order outside audits of their products in order to minimize the problems present in their software. The results of those audits are still to be seen because they take a lot of time. On the other hand, Mr. Mundie says that the problem with open source is that you have to spend much more time reviewing the code. Why? You have an open community of developers ready to share their knowledge and on the other side Microsoft employs people to do the audits. That probably goes like this: you search for a company, review their credentials, negotiate a price, signing non-disclosure agreements, make the audit in a controlled environment, etc. Is that quicker than making a product open source and having people contribute to its development?

In order to justify the insecurity of Microsoft products, Mr. Mundie also points out that programming is too error-prone and that the complexity of the evolving computer systems is too fast for people to comprehend. This is, unusual, at least, when coming from a CTO of the biggest software company in the World. He's really trying to tell us that all the money that closed source software has earned them is not enough to employ quality programmers? That seems to be the biggest problem in Microsoft - it's probably not the programmers, they probably have extremely qualified people, but rather the approach that they take when developing software. They should take a minute and stop thinking only about money and think about the users and their needs to have real "trustworthy computing" when using their products.


Sometimes I think that the only places Microsoft really thinks about the users and security is in the ads and in the speeches, the results are nowhere to be seen. And the excuse that security takes a lot of time to achieve is not to be even taken into consideration anymore, if the open source community can achieve it, why such a corporate giant can't?

Last, but not least, the number of Security Bulettins Microsoft issued this year until now is 57.