How different a place the web would be today if Microsoft had truly embraced innovation back then, instead of focusing solely on peripheral income streams. I think we can truly be grateful to the hard work of so many involved in the Mozilla Project as well as Webkit, but it's a shame it took those projects, and 10 long years for Microsoft to start really even talking web standards.
I don't see how that made the difference. If IE7 was released in 2004 or 2005, at best it would have been IE7 as we know it, and more likely would have been something halfway to IE7, and not particularly compelling - not unlike IE7.
As usual people who didn't care would use IE, and people seeking something better still would have used Firefox. Reading from their track history of lack of effort, innovation and overall mediocrity, there's no way MS could have killed Firefox and now Chrome by releasing some other schlonky IE.
IE7 in 2003 would have been much better than the IE7 that actually released.
The reason for that is that Microsoft disbanded the IE team after IE6. So to release IE7 they had to create a new team, get them trained up on the codebase and release something. And they were under time pressure, so they released as soon as they had something better than IE6. This took them probably 1-2 years at least between the learning and the coding.
If instead they had kept the existing IE6 team and had them work on IE7 back in 2001, they could have spent a full 2 years on development and delivered something significantly better than IE7 as it shipped. The difference from IE6 to that something would have been about like the difference from IE8 to IE9.
