[__b__]

Imagine if they had tried this with their corporate customers.

My advice to home users would be to disconnect their Windows computers from the internet and use some other OS for tasks that require internet. Use Windows offline for the graphical tasks that Microsoft was founded on.

I remember the days before Windows had a TCP/IP stack. Gates did not see the point in the internet or www immediately. UNIX computers were connected over the phone lines. Windows computers were not. Gates eventually woke up and MS copied the TCP/IP code they needed from BSD. The rest is history. Look at them now.

One should not need an internet connection to run Excel and create spreadsheets. If one needs to send a spreadsheet to some remote computer, there are other operating systems that can do that. Such as the one from which Microsoft copied the TCP/IP stack.

[m_mueller]

Or, do exactly this with an offline windows VM on a POSIX host. Even with enabled file sharing it should be reasonably secure in terms of privacy and at the same time convenient. The only usecases where this is not ideal: gaming and graphics heavy applications.

[garaetjjte]

If you have multiple monitors and graphics card you can assign one to VM with almost no performance loss.