It's really not. Do you actually know any Microsoft developers? It's just impolite for people at Microsoft to say: "Reddit says it wants this feature but we haven't implemented this feature. Why? Because we have done a massive user study in the past year on this and there are fewer than 1% of users (power users only) who actually care."
What you say is probably true, but it is severely broken. Let me give an example.
If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standards support will get them better web content.
Therefore IE decides that better standards support is not a priority. And doesn't implement it.
Conversely if IE did decide to implement better standards support, everyone would be better off.
However Microsoft wouldn't get much credit for it, because it wouldn't be obvious to users how important Microsoft's role was in making things better. And developers would say, "Finally!" But then curse Microsoft for years anyways because it takes that long to get the old, broken, browsers off of the market.
The result? IE is crap. And will remain crap. Indefinitely. And Microsoft is convinced that this is not a problem. (And for them it isn't - except for the also invisible problem that they have developed hiring problems in part because many good developers can't stand that attitude.)
I think you're being unfair. You act as though they aren't implementing any standards instead of just the ones that make a difference. At the end of the day, websockets is a mess and shouldn't (and isn't) be enabled in any web browser yet. But a whole bunch of other things are. Check the compatibility list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx. They actually have pretty solid support for most of the upcoming standards and are playing a significant role in the W3C process itself.
No, I'm just insulted. What jey is essentially saying is that I'm incompetent and condescending, but it's not my fault because I worked at Microsoft. That's patronizing and I'm not sure how you don't see that.
I don't mean that at all, and I'm sorry for coming across that way.
What I intended to communicate was that the incompetence applies to Microsoft as a whole. There's plenty of brilliant and competent individuals who work at Microsoft.
