Microsoft has put many defensive technologies, like ASLR, DEP and SAFESEH into Windows over the years to mitigate against the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Windows and applications. But Microsoft is rightfully very conservative about making such changes for all Windows users. There are other things that can be done which Microsoft has not seen fit to roll into Windows.
Instead, Microsoft puts these in the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET - pronounced with two soft e's). EMET is a tool you install on a Windows system which allows you to impose additional restrictions on specific applications on that system. It's common, when Microsoft discloses a vulnerability, for them to announce that use of EMET would mitigate it.
Most recently, in MS14-080, the December Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer, 11 of the 14 vulnerabilities were memory corruption vulnerabilities and the bulletin says that "EMET helps to mitigate these vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer on systems where EMET is installed and configured to work with Internet Explorer."
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See also: Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) - Windows 7 Help Forums