The e-mail message to Microsoft's customers is the latest monthly missive sent by the company's executives as part of a customer-relations drive known as Executive Emails. Coming a year after Gates exhorted company employees to focus on security, privacy and reliability, the memo predictably focuses on the results of that initiative.

"While we've accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still more to do--at Microsoft and across our industry," Gates wrote in the e-mail message, citing data from the Computer Security Institute and the FBI that estimated the damage from cyberattacks in 2001 at $455 million.

[ Read more ]