Last week I attended Standards.Next, a conference about what’s coming in HTML5 and CSS3 hosted by Opera (yes apparently they are still around!). It was curious to see Pete Le Page from Microsoft IExplorer team there. It was pretty brave, as IE is pretty much the problem with adoption of the advances being discussed. In the introductions part of the seminar, IE was universally bashed as the principle source of pain in the development cycle, one attendee describing how her team has dubbed it ‘Internet Exploder’ 
During QA after his presentation, one attendee asked, given the very long road for IE to catch up to the competition, why not adopt an open source engine like Webkit or Gecko? Pete (non)answered that IE has exciting new features, etc. Microsoft insists on reinventing the wheel, but square. The real problem is that, through some failure of the market, 90% of internet users will be using that square wheel. So you have to ask, how responsible is Micro$oft acting on insisting on developing a clearly inferior product, when they are servicing the majority of the market? And should pressure be coming from shareholders that M$ stop wasting money on a losing game?
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