From the outside it appeared very strongly that Microsoft deliberately allowed IE to stagnate with the end goal that the web should mean IE and IE only.
That wasn’t a response to government but a strategy to tie the web to Windows as the only platform which could run real IE6.
They could bundle a browser with macOS or Linux but it was much use if it wouldn’t work with your bank, corporate or government sites.
They used the same strategy to have Office files be memory dumps of the programs that created them and formidably hard to support by 3rd parties.
That wasn’t a response to government but a strategy to tie the web to Windows as the only platform which could run real IE6.
They could bundle a browser with macOS or Linux but it was much use if it wouldn’t work with your bank, corporate or government sites.
They used the same strategy to have Office files be memory dumps of the programs that created them and formidably hard to support by 3rd parties.