A fabulous example of this is Microsoft’s Live Messenger and their long running and unresolved failures to actually support audio-visual conversations for users running a Mac.

I use both a PC (actually a Tablet PC) and a Mac and I have just bought another laptop running Windows Vista (with an upgrade to Windows 7 coming in due course). On the Windows platforms I can run Live Messenger and hook up a webcam to have a face to face conversation with another Windows Live user.

If I’m at my flat on the Mac, I cannot.

Back in December 2008, Microsoft announced a forthcoming beta release of Messenger for Mac which would offer A/V support in 2009. Now, some 10 months later, there’s still no sign of it on the horizon, far less a final release version.

Pathetic!

Except by giving it all the bells and whistles, they’ve given it a huge potential security problem. How so? Well they’ve gone to town with speech recognition (the hyperlinks on the Windows Vista sections of the Microsoft website are changing very frequently, so bear with me).

So all you need is a microphone and you’re away, being able to dictate commands as well as by clicking or typing them. And don’t forget that many PCs have speakers too.

Ah.

So in theory, your speakers could say something and your PC could act on the commands? No, of course not. Er … well, yes, actually.

You might visit a web page, leave it on screen whilst you go and make a coffee or nip to the toilet and whilst you’re away, the page might refresh to another one which has an embedded sound file set to autoload and autorun. And that embedded sound file might tell your PC to open the file explorer, select your documents folder and delete the contents. Then it might tell the PC to delete all the files in the recycle bin too for good measure.

Microsoft wouldn’t let that happen, would they?

Well … yes they did. And here’s more on that.

Oh dear…