As background you may wish to consider the following video, which UNC recently made available (a couple of months ago to be precise). At the beginning of this talk, Bob Sutor explains why Microsoft feels threatened by Web technologies and standards. Think about Silverlight, OOXML and a family of server-side technologies Microsoft wants replaced by something it controls.
While we're presenting the views of one IBM employee, it might as well be added that Microsoft's DOS attack with heaps of pointless pages received a pushback from China, the world's largest population. From the blog of another IBMer:
For another demonstration of pure disingenuousness let’s look at Microsoft/Ecma’s response to China’s comment.
China filed along with their No vote in September a comment explaining that “we found it is a very complex technology […] We think the fast-track procedure is not suitable for this DIS” and ending with “more time is necessary and essential to conduct a credible and responsible evaluation.“
Seems reasonable enough and it’s fair to say that this sentiment is shared by many.
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it