Microsoft Patches IE Security Hole: Why do so many companies insist all employees use it?

An emergency fix was rushed out yesterday to deal with a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser that allowed Chinese hacks on major U.S. companies.

Microsoft has a long history of sticking automation into software to let it do really cool, interactive things with external applications across a local area network or even the Internet. Unfortunately, virtually every one of these really cool gimmicks has also let hackers do really cool things from remote locations, like look at your passwords, your personal information, your credit card numbers and PINs, And so come the patches, which you soon lose advantage if you don’t pay up for the next ‘upgrade’ to get the next batch of really cool things that interact even more.

Microsoft also has a long history of being better at inventing their own standards than following those set by industry-wide organizations. Not only are they not so good at following external standards, version to version, they aren’t even good at following the ones they invented. And so if you want to be able to open a document created with the latest version of Word and see all the beautiful new features, again you MUST shell out cash for upgrade after upgrade. And if you want to browse the Web with IE, you must live with the fact that even today, in its latest version, it gets some of the specs established a decade ago wrong, and doesn’t yet have full alpha channel support for Portable Network Graphics (PNG files) like all the other browsers do.

Just coincidence that all this leads to forced, paid upgrade after paid upgrade. Maybe so, but it’s sure gotten to be a long string of coincidences since Microsoft burst onto the scene with MS-DOS back in 1981. Do you think that the constant upgrade strategy just might be a deliberate ruse to drive profits?

Remind me again why so many corporations dictate that their employees use IE only on company computers.

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