This chart doesn't show the 5 year sabbatical that Microsoft decided to take between August 2001 and October 2006.
Major versions of IE tend to be (are always?) synced to OS releases. What effect did the Longhorn Reset have on the sabbatical Microsoft "decided to" take?
Does anyone know? I can't imagine I'm the only one to ask this in the intervening 4.5 years, but my Google searches aren't finding anything.
My understanding is that once MS won the '90s browser wars, they disbanded the IE team entirely. Only when new competition arrived did they restart development. I could be wrong, though...
During that same five year period MS screwed up virtually everything else they were working on. It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
To put it another way, do you suspect malice with how long Vista took? Probably not. I suspect that with Vista struggling all resources were moved to getting Vista back on track -- as important as IE is, Windows moreso.
I don't think he attributed disbanding the IE6 team to malice, MS had no need for that team anymore since they controlled virtually all of the browser market, and their main platform focus was never the web so there was little incentive for them to keep innovating there "for innovation's sake".
> It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
It's not that they couldn't get it out, there was no IE7 project until they reactivated MSIE in 2005.
This is what MS said on the issue (from Wikipedia):
"With the release of IE6 Service Pack 1 in 2003, Microsoft announced that future upgrades to Internet Explorer would come only through future upgrades to Windows, stating that "further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I think Vista messed up their plan. It doesn't sound like they just thought they were done. At least that was what they said in 2003. Now maybe you're saying internally something else was happening, but I hadn't heard that before.
Apparently in 2005 they then announced that they needed to do an out of band release for security.
As far as I know this is correct: after IE6 took down Netscape as an actual competitor, Microsoft put MSIE in maintenance mode as a project and most of the team was sent elsewhere, until the IE7 reactivation as Firefox started gaining significant market share.
Major versions of IE tend to be (are always?) synced to OS releases. What effect did the Longhorn Reset have on the sabbatical Microsoft "decided to" take?
Does anyone know? I can't imagine I'm the only one to ask this in the intervening 4.5 years, but my Google searches aren't finding anything.