I know people on the IE team, and they are genuinely enthusiastic about HTML5 and the web as a platform. In recent years IE pioneered sandboxed tabs, GPU-accelerated rendering engines, and some privacy stuff (that I found incredibly boring but they thought was really important). They didn't need to do that stuff. If Chrome hadn't reignited the browser wars so strongly, I wouldn't be surprised if IE would've been closing in on Firefox quality-wise at this point.
In the time I worked at MS and was able to get the inside scoop on how different product teams work, I found that the cynical explanation was almost never the truth. I can't think of a single person I met at MS who was playing to lose. If the IE team is underdelivering compared to other browser vendors, it's not due to an exec telling them not to try. You would probably be shocked at how difficult it is to ship software at Microsoft, for a variety of reasons, none of them malicious.
In the time I worked at MS and was able to get the inside scoop on how different product teams work, I found that the cynical explanation was almost never the truth. I can't think of a single person I met at MS who was playing to lose. If the IE team is underdelivering compared to other browser vendors, it's not due to an exec telling them not to try. You would probably be shocked at how difficult it is to ship software at Microsoft, for a variety of reasons, none of them malicious.