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.
See http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-take-so-long-to-relea...
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.