[omnigoat]

This post makes one incorrect statement, I think:

"And that cuts to heart of why developers and anyone with an interest in the using the web of the future today has long since lost faith in Internet Explorer: The competition continues to deliver improvements at a pace that far outstrips Internet Explorer."

The competitor's products are better, but they were waaay better before IE8 even existed. After IE9, assumedly, they'll still be better, but by far less a distance. Google is really the only company in the world that can rival Microsoft's speed in development (when it sets its mind to it). Honestly, here's what I think happened: Microsoft missed the internet-apps thing. They sort of grew, and Microsoft didn't notice for a while. Then they exploded and Microsoft was caught off-guard with a browser the developers didn't like, and a business strategy that was out-dated. But being Microsoft, and they're not dumb guys, they started improving their browser and began to write some neat cloud software (Web Office, anyone?).

You'll notice this thinking in what they concentrate on: To Microsoft, web apps are where it's at, and javascript speed is important! It makes things run better. But if you look to web standards, you'll see Microsoft talk about "real world cases", or however they put it. They don't care about 100% compliance, they don't have time. They're playing catch-up, and are focusing on the areas that will make the most difference first. It's sort of like Startup 101. My belief is that they'll continue to improve the standards, but will devote, say, %20 of their efforts to it, until their javascript engine and css rendering layout engine is humming in tune with V8 and Sunspider.

Maybe afterwards they'll decide to go with full-standards compliance, one would have to look at the development cost vs. the predicted returns, but it wouldn't be a terrible idea, really, to woo developers over from other platforms: "Yeah, our performance is the same, and we're at 100%. You can develop for us and on us with no problems, assuming the competitors follow the standards like us".

But that's probably wishful thinking.

[ramanujan]

> Google is really the only company in the world that can rival Microsoft's speed in development (when it sets its mind to it)

I'm curious -- what MS product specifically are you thinking of here?

I think Apple at a minimum has consistently out-executed Microsoft. Nintendo, VMWare, and Facebook also all come to mind (along with any other small company that MS acquired).

The most interesting things from MS I've heard about recently are Project Natal, Pivot, and Azure.

Are you thinking of something in particular?

[omnigoat]

I'm thinking about the (No Internet Explorer) -> Internet Explorer 3.0 jump, which has been cited before as an example of what Microsoft is capable of when it suddenly throws the 'code red' flag (ie, Netscape and the internet are suddenly important). I can also think of Win98 -> Win98SE jump, and Visual Studio 6 -> Visual Studio 2005 (remember, they didn't start development on VS.NET/2003 until around 2000/2001).

Don't mistake speed of releases or popularity or innovation for the speed of development. Nintendo is a particularly poor example, I think, since I'm currently working with their tools... they are last-decade. I'm not even talking about the Wii's capabilities (which are Gamecube-era), I'm talking about their software: IDEs, compilers, etc. They struck gold with the Wii, but Microsoft went from (No Console) -> XBox360 within... like, 5 years? Nintendo's been playing this game for 25+ years, and without the unmitigated success of the Wii their console division would be bankrupt now (seriously!)

Microsoft's ability to develop (notably, but not limited to) software is unparalleled save for Google. Innovation, iteration, or popularization are all different matters.

[bartl]

>I'm thinking about the (No Internet Explorer) -> Internet Explorer 3.0 jump

But they didn't build that from scratch, they bought the original Mosaic codebase.

[agazso]

It is wishful thinking regarding that Microsoft has currently four (IE 6, 7, 8 and the compatibility mode) slightly different implementations, and this number will only increase with their development.

The real problem is that web standards of the past (made by W3C) were overly complicated and not practical, so the browser developers had to make engineering trade-offs to implement a subset of them. So in practical sense there is no such thing as standard compliance, and this is not something Microsoft can go with.

[thwarted]

One problem with putting standards compliance at such a low priority is that then they continue to screw the developers -- in the same way they have been with previous releases. It doesn't matter if the javascript engine is fast if the page looks like crap or developers continue to spend a lot of time trying to get a consistent experience across browsers.