Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Quick answers – No, and TBD.

Some of my background – I was a Senior Product Manager on the Internet Explorer team for nearly two years from just past the launch of IE6 on XPSP2, through the launch of IE7. It’s always a sensitive issue talking about your former jobs/employers, and so, in the interest of keeping the secrets confidential, let me limit the majority of my observations to what I didn’t see. During our drive to launch IE7, I didn’t see people ignoring the direction the Web was going, such as standards support, a focus on rendering and Javascript speed, and enhanced security implementation. I didn’t see people ignorant of the fact that IE had not had a major public release in five years, and that other browsers were doing very creative and interesting work, from the extension model in Firefox, to the lightweight architecture of WebKit (backbone of Safari, and Google Chrome). And I didn’t see a bunch of people who were just phoning it in; the people on the IE team wanted to reboot the franchise, get the browser back in the game, and compete. But the fact is that, even with years of (public) neglect, there were hundreds of millions of desktops which required IE working exactly as IE had always been. And this was the blessing and a curse that underlies where IE is today.

 
When the  EOLAS lawsuit reached its peak, the IE team released an alternate version of the browser that required a click to activate any kind of embedded object (including ActiveX). Despite discussing this for over three years, and letting every software vendor know what was coming (the vast majority with 1:1 communication), the number of compatibility problems reported was simply mind boggling. More than anything, what it showed was just how insane developers can get when they can dictate exactly what end users MUST use. We discovered MAJOR ISVs with the most ridiculous implementations I’ve ever seen – 50 embedded objects on a page, iframes inside of iframes cross calling objects and storing sessions on the server, and generally people breaking every best practice and guidance known to man in order to get their line of business app working, standards and compatibility be damned. Because Firefox/Webkit never had to deal with these odd implementations, they had infinite flexibility to start from scratch. So the thousands of apps that required IE both made sure it was a requirement on every desktop and was the albatross around its neck when it came to moving the platform forward.
 

This is what people who are all about the Innovator’s Dilemma seem to miss. Yes, there is room in the marketplace for very lightweight versions of existing products – and those products have a chance at success (even revolutionary success). But, unlike the physical world, software products “break” much less frequently – they don’t rust, they don’t require regular maintenance, and, if your requirements don’t change, they can basically chug along forever. So Internet Explorer, in the interest of keeping the existing customers happy, had to make sure that as they got development going again, they did not unnecessarily break the thousands of people who were happily using IE6 every day.

How does this relate to those market share numbers? Internet Explorer is down huge – depending on what survey you read, 30-40 points off its peak of 90+%. However, we must ask: how did it get to be so large in the first place? Microsoft was (and to a large part, is) a business whose Enterprises, barring two exceptions (OEMs (Dell, HP, etc), who do sell direct to end users, but act like Enterprises when recommending features; and Xbox, a business that had to be(until recently) five miles away from the main campus in order to have a different focus). Beyond those two specific instances, that’s all MS knows. This is not a bad thing – recent insane market valuations aside – Microsoft became the largest and most successful software company in history by focusing almost entirely on one market. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that consumers were the reason why.

Every so often, the seams that reveal the heart of Microsoft show through, and the struggle for browser market share is one of those instances. Internet Explorer is basically an Enterprise Browser – it has a huge code base dedicated entirely to things that only Enterprises would value. And in the late 90s and early 2000s, when Netscape was shooting itself in the foot with the 6.0 rewrite , IE 4/5/6 was simply the only choice out there. And MS let itself believe that it was the best choice for all people – it was taking advantage of a fraudulent market. Because there were simply no other viable competitors and so people used their only choice – an Enterprise web browser – for their home solution. But now that there _are_ alternatives and those alternatives are specifically focused on consumers, it makes sense that MS share should decline, and no amount of Redmond handwringing will change any of that.
 
So what should the state of the browser market actually be? First, there are still millions upon millions of desktops in the world with IE on them, and thousands upon thousands of apps that depend on the APIs, the architecture, and all those special cases the IE team built specifically for those products. Further, I’ve been pretty impressed with the IE teams velocity and quality – 8 was a quick and solid, though not mind blowing; 9 has some really nifty stuff going on under the hood. They’ll never get back to 90% – they never deserved to be there in the first place. But they’ll come back as Mozilla returns to its deserved level as well (see  Blake Ross vs. John Lilly on Quora for more details about this). Whether or not it stabilizes at its current share, or adds another twenty points is irrelevant – IE will always be big enough that MS will drive standards and user experience. Regardless if IE marketshare ends up at 30% or 80%, it will never affect a customer choosing to buy a copy of an MS product.
 
So what does this all have to do with your business? It goes to the importance of knowing who you are. Focus on your core – both what you do well and who you are listening to. You may make phenomenal progress in a certain market, but if that’s not your core area of expertise, your success is just found money – it’ll go away as quickly as you found it. But, if you keep your core customers happy, as MS has done (by and large) with Enterprises – that’ll be the path to long term success.
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