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It boggles my mind that this can be a post-1998 worldview. I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant? Or will a

It boggles my mind that this can be a post-1998 worldview. I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant? Or will a mobile world prove them right, but too early?

JohnBooty 12y ago
> I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant? Yeah. At the time when the IE team was disbanded, Internet usage was still exploding in the US and all over the world. There's just literally no way they could have looked at that and concluded that it was some kind of fad that had run its course. If Brendan Eich honestly believes Microsoft thought that, I'm glad he wound up not being CEO of Mozilla. Instead, I think it's incredibly clear that Microsoft understood the web's power very well. Once they achieved near-total market share with IE6, they clearly made a conscious, strategic decision to retard the growth of the web by ceasing to improve their browser because they knew that the growth of the web would render one's operating system mostly irrelevant someday. And it actually worked for a few years in the early 2000's. Sort of. Dragging their heels on IE6 did buy Microsoft some time; they just didn't manage to use it very well (thankfully). Things stagnated on the client-side web for a while in the early 2000s (because anything you built still had to work on IE6) and Microsoft continued to incrementally improve Windows, Office, they started Silverlight, and their server-side dev tools inched ahead as well.