Microsoft has economic incentive to stay competitive on many fronts. I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, to make their browser more standards compliant, and to substantially improve security. It makes no strategic or tactical sense for them to do otherwise -- to improve the browser is not to make the desktop less attractive.
I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster,
Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P
It is incorrect to conclude that Microsoft's lack of achievement in X implies (1) its lack of ambition for improving X, or (2) [as ancestor suggested] its determination to sabotage X.
Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?
Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level -- requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.
I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.
I know they have good people in there, but the fact is that they are pulling us back. They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.
This is the most compelling evidence that Microsoft always thinks about preserving the status-quo instead of advancing the state of the art. It's their decision and their company, but I'm not going to accept apologies for them lightly.
They want to change their image, then they should play nicer with their competition and with us. I don't know how they could do that, but off the top of my head ... why not open-source Silverlight to make it a true standard? But they won't do that since they need control. And round and round we go.
> They couldn't get off their asses to work on IE 7 until Firefox became a credible threat.
This is very true and I've always felt it is a strong condemnation of what goes on inside Microsoft. I neglected to mention this sorry bit of history in my posts above mostly because it's a bit old news. Today, IE is a fully-staffed, heavily armed, etc.
I don't think I apologized for Microsoft. There is no excuse for having previously shut down IE, or for having such poor execution now that the IE team is back. There are, however, explanations... ones which hopefully help to dispel the myth that Microsoft is, today, intentionally holding the browser back. The truth is much more mundane.
First, it is entirely possible for Microsoft to continue to reap rewards from Windows while improving their browser at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. I reject the perspective that says the browser will win at the cost of desktop APIs. Everything has its place.
Second, while Windows may make shareholders (and your hypothetical "mid-level executives") fat today, they are under no illusions that it will make them fat tomorrow. Innovating for the future is an earnest and honest goal at Microsoft. This includes the browser, too. Who is to say where the next cash cow will be?
(Also: for some strange reason, I can't reply directly to you. Why would that be the case?)
Making the browser and web applications a viable alternative to their cash cows (Windows, Office, BackOffice) would seriously compromise the fat bonuses even mid-level executives get and would seriously jeopardize top management's position in front of their shareholders.
It simply does not happen this way. Not with a big public company that enjoy a monopoly with insanely fat margins.
