They released a good product, but weren't prepared to keep it up-to-date with the expectations that a de-facto industry standard should be able to handle. The

They released a good product, but weren't prepared to keep it up-to-date with the expectations that a de-facto industry standard should be able to handle. The web kept on moving after IE6 was released - XHR, jQuery, and later on HTML5 and CSS3. Being a browser entirely developed and maintained by a private corporation subject to the shareholders priorities more than the Acid3 test results, Microsoft decided to ignore the calls to adhere to the new standards for as long as it could, and started developing its own internal awful standards to patch the lack of adherence to the W3C standards (ActiveX, VBScript, Silverlight...). When Microsoft realized that a privately held company alone couldn't win a fight on your-own-propretary-standards Vs. what the rest of the world wants, it was too late. IE had become an unmaintainable patched monolith that had seen its market share drop from 90% to 20%, losing to the new rivals. They had to basically trash the old code and start from scratch with Edge to still be vaguely competitive. Microsoft's story taught us that you can't push for your own standards while ignoring what the community wants and expect to survive for a long time. Google seems to have learned that lesson over these years (that's why Chrome still dominates the market), but if they start favoring their internal corporate priorities over the most pristine standard adherence, they might drift into the Microsoft case ad well.