In my last post, I talked about Dvorak blasting IE as Microsoft's biggest mistake. A few days later, I came across a "review" of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, and their opinion was basically too little, too late.
In many ways, Microsoft is stuck in the age of big, spread-out releases. It's used to the prospect of building up a huge set of new features into a big product, selling it, and then moving on to the next two-year development plan. That's not the world of the Internet. The Internet has made it so that if you're not jumping on the latest new customer expectation, someone else is, and their product is just a free download away.(Read the full article.)
The other main point in the article is that IE 7 may be nice, but when it's finally out, is it really going to offer anything new to convince people to come back? What will it have to bring back the millions of people that switched? Most likely, not much. It's been 5 years since IE 6 was released, and in that time, too much has changed while Microsoft was standing still thinking that they had definitively won the browser wars.
Then again, when Vista ships, most people will probably continue using IE since it comes with the computer. And maybe IE 7 won't be so bad that people will still be looking for alternatives. It's kind of sad to think that complacency may be motivating most people's software choices nowadays.
If complacency is a strong motivator for software choices, then the burden must lie on Web developers to make people change. Web developers must take the hit and stop supporting IE. Write your page in modern Web standards. If it works in IE, great. If it doesn't, tough luck.
I know that goes against business responsibility but someone needs to take the hit for the team and Web developers are the only ones who can ensure change.