The only way that Microsoft (or any other organization) would be liable for this would be if they contractually agreed to such a constraint. And, having been working with Microsoft’s agreements for over a decade, I can tell you without a doubt that they don’t have this in their template (and that they don’t come too far “off” their template, even for REALLY big deals).

The net-net on this is that unless there’s a larger agreement in place (for example, if Microsoft has an agreement with the W3C to keep IE compliant with the standards), Microsoft has ZERO liability (of any sort).

Microsoft is just playing games. If they were honest, they’d try very hard to jointly with their customers make public the full discussion and reasoning that led them to their position that html rendering for the entire web and for every browser (not just in corporate intranets) needs to be frozen absent a special tag.

That is how standards ought to be done.

Are you familiar with the “deep pockets” theory of lawsuits?

Sorry, one more quote from Microsoft Korea and the Korean government around the Vista launch. If the Korean government’s request was not enough to delay the Vista launch, I’m wondering if Microsoft would have ignored a similar request from the US government.

With just a week to go before Vista comes out, much remains to be done but Microsoft has declined to postpone the release. “We’ve been testing Vista with banks and other service providers since September, but we encountered more delays than we expected,” a Microsoft official said. “We plan to release the product as scheduled.”

There’s not much the government can do, either. “We can’t tell a private enterprise to postpone the release of a new product,” an official from the Ministry of Information and Communication said. The best thing, the official said, is for Internet users to check with their service providers to see if there will be any problems before they use Vista. In other words, don’t install Vista before you know what you’re getting into.

Microsoft Vista to Cause Confusion for Korean Net Users

I suggest you go read the blogs of some of the MS employees who work on backwards compatibility to see the lengths they go to.

Browsers are important but they are not embedded in mission critical systems, or at least if they are, those who have put the browser in that situation are more responsible than MS.

The reality is that it doesn’t take that much effort to recode web software.

Any company with any sense of reality would realise the cost of lawyers would be heaps more than the cost of fixing their software. For those ambulance chasers out there expecting a huge payout to cover any costs, all MS has to do is volunteer to fix whatever software is busted.

I’m not a lawyer but I have to wonder what sort of legal advice MS is getting. Surely they realise that they were given nothing more than a slap on the wrist worldwide for anti-trust. MS is practically untouchable legally.

I can’t speak to your first two questions but on the third Chris Wilson certainly has a lot to answer with respect to the release of IE7 in South Korea. The S. Korean Government, no less, requested to Microsoft Korea to delay the release of IE7 in Korea without success. Essentially all of South Korea is on Microsoft software, and yet Microsoft would not listen to the request of Korea- it was more important to have a global release of IE7 than to deal with the issues around ActiveX in Korea.

In January of 2007, 3 South Korean government bodies, the Ministry of Information and Communication, the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, and the Financial Supervisory Service warned Korean Internet users to delay purchasing or upgrading to Microsoft Vista due to Vista and IE7’s new handling of Active-X controls. – Microsoft Vista to Cause Confusion for Korean Net Users

If Microsoft didn’t listen to the Korean government, it’s humorous to hear Chris Wilson talk about government intranets or commercial intranets, because IE7 in Korea broke all kinds of public websites, not just intranets.