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"Wrong, and bad logic. There is not such thing as an "IE standard". IE is a "proprietary" inplementation of the international standard. Web developers are not about to develop web sites that can only use IE features. Bad for business and consumers are ill served since Microsoft (and others) don't adequately support the standardized features."

Nonsense.
IE has over 92% of the browser market.
There is such a thing as defacto standard and IE is it.
Its like how MS-Dos became the defacto standard for PC operating systems all those years go.
Were there lots of other operating systems?
You bet!
There were over a hundred of them.
The market, finally determined which standard to back, and they backed MS-Dos, same as they backed IE 6 years ago.
Web developers have been developing for IE now for over 6 years.
Its not a matter of "Web developers are not about to develop web sites that can only use IE features"
They already have!
And its been VERY GOOD for business.
Internet commerce, Internet use, every measure of Internet business has simply BOOMED massively over the past 6 years, running on the back of IE, which is the only way over 92% of Internet users do business on the web.
IE has been very good for Internet business

Its like how MS-Dos became the defacto standard for PC operating systems all those years go.

Actually PC-DOS was the defacto standard. MS-DOS had smaller marketshare.

Were there lots of other operating systems?
You bet!
There were over a hundred of them

Really? Besides CP/M and DR-DOS how many can you name.

Truly delusionary.

Perhaps you should do a little homework before you make idiotic statements about "hundreds" of PC operating systems. If your are talking about minicomputers & mainframes, they are all Unix derivatives (also open source).

Before you ridicule open source, perhaps you could consider that the ENTIRE internet is built on "open source", and includes the specification for HTTP & SMTP/POP3, DNS, et al.

Or did you think that Al Gore worked for Microsoft?

IBM and AT&T once had 80%+ marketshare too. International standards encouraged the competition that trimmed them down to size too.