This really isn’t very involved. I was looking at two sets of numbers:

MS just launched ie9. Supposedly faster and more secure. There are a lot of qualifiers to that.

But, even if there weren’t, I still don’t get how they think. Granted, over the seven months, XP’s share dropped 10% (54% to 44%). IE’s share dropped 10% also (36% to 26%) while the big winner was Chrome (10% to 24%).

So why didn’t they make ie9 for XP which still has 44% of the OS market?

It would seem to me that they would want to hold onto that, no? Was their thinking, “Let them use ie8.”?  Seems to me that’s short sighted (and just a tad arrogant).

Wouldn’t it have been smarter (overall) to say, “These are tough economic times. We understand, and will extend support for XP longer than we planned originally and continue to make ie8 as secure and trustworthy as we can.”?

So can you explain this? – who was smarter?

As Firefox is setting download records, and Chrome is greased lightning, both having great extensions.