Microsoft's development model is fundamentally broken

Summary: Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) helps show that Microsoft cannot keep up with the competition, to which it carries on losing market share

Microsoft has been looking for the cheapest workforce available and it ignored the value of code which is shared. Also, for the past few years it repeated some of the mistakes made by Adobe. Nobody should be shocked to learn that IE9 is a trainwreck with a lot of marketing in disguise, parts of its leadership jumping ship, and the offshoring of development taking its toll. It is now being shown that, even on Windows, IE9 performs a lot worse than its competition which is Free software (not just Chrome but Firefox too). The source of the benchmark is a Microsoft booster (thus little room for allegations of bias against Microsoft), who shows bar charts and concludes:

Chrome is the obvious winner in these tests. It has a such a significant lead that we doubt it's going to be bumped out of the top spot anytime soon, especially if we take into consideration that the team wants to release a major version every six weeks. Still, competition in the browser market is only getting fiercer, so Chrome's king-of-the-hill status may not last forever.

Microsoft's development model (working in isolation) is too expensive and slow. It cannot keep up with the competition, even that which runs on Windows (in addition to other platforms). Things are not going to improve for Microsoft, which is why we track its moves a lot less extensively these days. The increased importance of the Web poses a challenge due to Fog Computing. ⬆