It spread almost instantaneously over the globe, with 10 new strains quickly appearing. All of which paints a grim picture for an increasingly technology dependent world. Microsoft could solve, say, the macro virus problem tomorrow - if it wanted. But it won't, for legitimate commercial reasons. It's never going to sell its word processor on the basis that you can't do all kinds of cool things with macros.
Security always loses out to functionality.
That has been the history of software. Two, put a system on your email gateway to block dodgy attachments like the Visual Basic files we saw here. Consider yourselves warned.