I don't know much about the past, but in at least the past 3 years, Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there. This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/
And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.
They've had to put some resources on to IE as they didn't bother for the previous 8 years and the stench of the rotten putrid corpse of IE6 was even starting to get to them.
When a single someone can make a tiny javascript file that fixes nearly all the rendering problems in your browser (Dean Edwards, IE6.js, IIRC) then it starts to look really bad for your abilities as a multinational megacorp that's supposed to employ some of the finest programming minds.
My impression is that it's still a pretty small team, if only they'd done it consistently over the last 10 years.
And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.