Scoble notes the progress towards making PC's "dull" (in the sense that TVs are dull - that they "just work"):

Scott Koon is bored by all the stuff he saw come out of Winhec yesterday. Or, more accurately, he's ambivilent. I can understand that. Sometimes computers seem as exciting as cable TV, electricity, or water.

Well, we aren't there yet. Sadly, we aren't even close. When I visited LA recently, I spent a decent amount of time securing my wife's cousin's PC. I'm on the hook to visit one of her co-workers, so that I can do the same there. The trouble is, most people want to treat a PC the way they treat a TV. That's just not feasible yet. You need anti-virus protection, you need a working firewall (in addition to the NAT protection offered by a router), and you need anti-spam software. My wife was commenting the other day that she couldn't get email while my daughter was present.

Is all of this MS' fault? No, it's not - but they bear a fair bit of the blame for having whistled past the graveyard on security for years. We're going to be paying the price for that decision for years, as we wait for Windows 98/ME to die off.