Chris was my direct manager for two or three of my years at MSFT. He genuinely cares about the web in a way that always surprised people outside of Microsoft. (He was also good at being pragmatic about what could be done within the company). He's been around since the NCSA days and really knows his stuff. This is MSFTs loss.
I once watched a panel discussion with him and a representative from Opera and Mozilla. I never understood how someone who is as likeable as him could come up with something as evil as Internet Explorer 6-8.
Keep in mind that we released IE6 before many of these standards were written or clarified. It also wasn't clear at the time if the standard to follow was the W3C on or the defacto standard the reflects all of the quirks introduced by Netscape and previos versions of IE. Doctype switches were largely untested at that point.
The sin wasn't in IE6 itself but rather in letting it rot as the world moved on.
Oh - and the security sucked. That was pretty bad too.
I'm as guilty as anyone else on the team for pushing forward to Avalon/WPF. The truth is that much of the team was just exhausted an wanted to do something else. It was people higher in the chain that dropped the ball on IE completely.
The funny thing is that HTML5 does much of the stuff we originally wanted to do with Avalon. We just didn't have the structure, people or support to do it within the standards process. Also the W3C was a different force then and I suspect fast innovation driven by Microsoft wouldn't have been accepted. (Karma's a bitch.)
Anyway when much of this became clear I moved on to google. :)
"Evil" is relative and no one intends to harm humanity when they set out to produce software (except maybe virus writers): it's just that bureaucracy and "market strategy" brings out the worst in otherwise well meaning products and processes.
I don't think that IE6 was actually evil, although Microsoft paid scant disregard to anything resembling a web standard. The problem was probably more that by the time IE6 came along Microsoft just no longer cared about the browser, and let entropy take its toll in the form of all sorts of popups, malware infestations and security crevasses. By the time they got a clue it was too late, and all the folks that mattered had moved to other browsers.
During my stint at MS I took a "Developing at Microsoft" class. The teacher was a lead dev on the IE team, and according to him, after IE6 MS considered the browser "done" and basically disbanded the team.
"moving from microsoft to google": 2870 hits, most of which seem to be about changing jobs in that direction. "moving from google to microsoft": 7 hits. only one of which seems to be about changing jobs.
Perhaps I'd have got different results with Bing?
... Always keen to spoil a joke, I tried, and actually the answer is yes. 37 and 4. Perhaps half of the 37 were about job moves; none of the 4.
