OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?
They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.
However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?
They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.
However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?