Virtually never have there been so much controversy about any subject in the history of Computing as Internet Explorer has been attracting the last couple of years. The arguments have been many, many of them centered around lack of support for the W3C standards, but lately also JavaScript speed have been a runner up for the most frequently used arguments.
And IE have been given nicknames such as Internet Exploder and Intranet Explorer. None of these are very flattering nick names for the employees at Microsoft.
However recently a lot of really strong companies such as Google have even decided upon completely giving up support for IE, *ALL* versions. Just 12 months ago this would have been considered so controversial that it would have been outrageous to even suggest.
About three months ago I was given a task from a customer of us to analyze the Market Shares of Internet Explorer in the hopes of getting data to make end users upgrade from IE6 to hopefully at least IE7, preferably IE8. What I found was pretty stunning to say the least. Take a look at the image below...
If you take a look at the above image it may seem quite confusing, but there was a lot of hidden interesting facts within it once I started diving into it. The data to create that statistic was taken from W3Schools.com, and many people may claim - justified - that W3Schools is probably not the best place to get "neutral data" since they target developers. However W3Schools is a *HUGE* website, they publish their data and they have done so for a very long time. Also even if you buy into the argument that "developers are using cutting edge stuff which is not relevant for end users", everyone knows that whatever a developer is using today, John Doe highly likely will use 2 years down the road. System Developers are the "innovators" of the Software Industry.
Notice the particulary favorite point of mine, which is that IE7 started dropping a couple of months *before* IE8 was even launched - or gained any significant market shares at least. This say something about both the fact that IE *IS* declining, and even more interesting, Microsoft's ability to release products almost perfectly timed to take over for existing dying products - Good work Microsoft ... ;)
Not to mention that if they hadn't released IE8, it may seem like - according to the graph - that every single user upgrading away from IE6 would *NOT* choose IE7, but rather "anything else". From a cynical and strategical point of view, one has to admire these maneuvers from MSFT and their product and strategy departments.
Though my absolute favorite piece of data which you can read out of that statistic is that absolutely no versions of IE is anywhere near the current's browser market leader. Not to mention that only a couple of months down the road, there will be two browsers in the world which both are bigger than any one single version of Internet Explorer. This is highly significant, since "the IE death march" will then have reached a point of no return. Web Developers are simple beings, I know I am one ;) - and we don't have time to "test against everything", at least not in most of our projects. This means we end up testing for the two or three largest browser, and then we don't care about the rest that much. When no versions of IE is no longer even the second largest browser in the world about 6 months from now, web developers will stop caring completely about it, and realize that IE has no future. This will happen about 4-8 months from now if you interpolate the statistics forward in time.
IE dies 4 years from now, or...?
If you however filter the data from the above graph in such a way that all the IE statistics are summarized and all the non-IE statistics also is summarized, you'll discover a much more interesting [and *clear*] graph of the future of Internet Explorer.
Why does it matter?
It matters for a lot of reasons. First of all computing is beginning to move into a spot where it's actually possible to industrialize it in a "grown up's industrial direction". But to be able to take the final leap into growing up the IT business so that it's not haunted by troubles like impossible interoperability, lack of standards, wave-like hirings and firings due to bear and bull markets, etc, etc, etc. We *MUST* take Open Standards and interoperability way more serious than we have done in the past. It is about time that the IT industry - and especially the Software industry - grows up and becomes mature, but for this to happen we must have Open Standards that makes it possible to create interoperability beteen different systems in such a way that no one player basically "owns" the industry the way it has been ever since the 50s and the industry was initially created.
And Microsoft cannot earn money on doing such a thing...!
For Microsoft the web and Open Standards is Disruptive Technologies, and there is no way they can make money on supporting such a direction, in fact they will lose money because of this directions the industry has taken. If you don't believe me realize that Microsoft spent nearly 6 years with no upgrades to their web browser, in a period when other browser vendors would come out with new versions of their browsers virtually every month. This does at least show that they have no incentives in "upgrading the web" the way other Software Vendors have.
To understand the momentum and the amount of force we're talking about here, realize that Internet Explorer 8 was the largest update in the history of IE, and it actually was a significant update! IE8 was orders of magnitude better then IE7 in virtually every possible way, and Microsoft probably spent huge resources on IE8. Still when IE8 came out, it made a small "hick" in the browser statistics which lasted about a month or something before it re-started its inevitable decline towards zero again...
Microsoft may come out with something spectacular, something that blows people away, to such an extend that they may be able to turn around its decline towards browser death, but I doubt it, they've got too much invested in their current business model for being able to take this leap, and a leap like this would basically force them into "Eating all of their current babies". Which I don't see will happen anytime soon ...
I remember an employee at Microsoft about 5 years ago trying to convince me about how Microsoft was reciliant towards Disruptive Technologies, maybe they were, one thing's for sure they were not reciliant towards arrogance ...
40 years ago, Microsoft was the handsom Prince fighting the Evil King called "King Big Blue", today Microsoft are the "King Big Blue", attracting all the hatred, and nothing less of a revolution can change that ...
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