More from the ‘You couldn’t make it up’ department

“There was only one way Microsoft could screw up its dominance among Web browsers, and by golly, those clever folks up in Redmond seem to have come up with it: Allow a neverending string of increasingly dangerous security flaws to scare users away. And when a government agency posts what amounts to a public service announcement on behalf of the competition, you can almost hear the self-destruct mechanism clicking down. Last week was particularly rough for Internet Explorer, with the disclosure of a nasty, data-snatching Trojan that exploited a combination of vulnerabilities that had gone unfixed for months. Then Microsoft issued a work-around that didn’t really solve the problem. Now comes word that there’s yet another hole through which this evil can creep. But IE still has a few things going for it, namely ubiquity and inertia. “Mozilla has shown itself to be a capable browser and has only gotten better with each release, but until something bad happens to more people, then the interest in moving to that is not going to be that high,” said Dennis Barr, IT manager at civil engineering consulting company Larkin Group Inc., in Kansas City, Mo.

That’s right — the perceptions are the problem: From Steve Ballmer’s annual State of the Empire memo to the Microsoft troops: ‘We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security.'”

Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Thanks to Good Morning, Silicon Valley.