[CWuestefeld]

they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards

At the time, IE6 was more standards-compliant than any other browser. The problem here isn't that it was a bad browser, it's because the standards refuse to sit in one place.

[CamperBob]

Point being, though, the "standards" that are causing trouble today were proprietary to Microsoft (ActiveX, for example).

I shouldn't have used the term "proprietary standards" at all -- it's a bit of an oxymoron.