Microsoft has learned some very serious lessons when it comes to complying with web standards after taking heavy criticism from the industry and, more importantly, a beating in the browser market share.
In a video interview last month, Microsoft blogger and group manager of technical community, Frank Arrigo, explained how important it is for the Redmond giant to follow web standards.
"Standards are important," said Arrigo, who admitted that Microsoft had been guilty of ignoring them in the past. "If you look at IE6 [Intenet Explorer 6], we didn't quite follow all the standards but standards are important... IE7 as an example is trying to address that."
In July 2003, IE owned more than 90 percent of the browser market and very few companies even bothered testing their web applications against anything other than Microsoft's (non-standards compliant) browser.
In that position of power, Microsoft announced that IE would no longer be released as a standalone browser and instead would be available only as part of the next desktop operating system — at that time known only by the code-name Longhorn, but since released as Windows Vista.
News source: ZDNet (Includes video interview)
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