Microsoft newer products, since the complete widespreading of Internet, which would begin by the end of the last century, are PARANOID. First of all, they assume the user is a complety newbie that will do everything wrong. Secondly, they assume everything outside (and, sometimes, inside) the computer that can be harmful will be. In other words, MS has closed all doors to your computer that they could imagine, so that no hacker could exploit them.
Of course, all this paranoia accomplished nothing. MS browsers, OSes and Applications are still vunerable to exploits. But it also made the life of the user (us!) much more difficult -- we have to click a lot of pop-ups to let our applications make anything deemed harmful, like downloading a file from the internet or modifying the system register. But today, I've come to the best example of how this untrusting paranoia can be paradoxal:
I use MS Project server on my projects and today I decided to try to integrate it with my Outlook 2007. So I navigate to the Project portal and browse to the web page where I can download the plugin. Naturally, this is a ActiveX plugin that is unsafe accordingly to Microsoft, so when I click the button, I get this message box:
Now, MS asks me to disable all that security paranoia, and just be careful. See the deadlock they've created?
