Microsoft needs to hit a home run with IE9, or the IE franchise is going to go the way of Geocities. That's not necessarily true. It could be that the current

Microsoft needs to hit a home run with IE9, or the IE franchise is going to go the way of Geocities. That's not necessarily true. It could be that the current version(s) of IE are good enough for what most users need, or at least that the cost of changing browsers exceeds the benefit. If that's true, then the level of performance that IE provides will prevail, and the recent standards and performance achievements of other platforms will just be sales talking points. HTML 5, etc., does not represent user demands (at least not directly). It represents what developers want to be able to do. If our users refuse to provide the requirements for those developers' apps to run, then it's going to be the developers who have to change. (I make no judgments about the merits of this, just observing where the balance of power lies.)