Joel Spolsky on the IE-is-dead meme:

I suppose one possibility is that Microsoft plans to not make IE available to all developers as a component in some future operating system

Joel is far smarter than I can ever hope to be, but this makes no sense. Charging for shdocvw and mshtml (both of which CityDesk uses extensively, btw) makes about as much sense as charging developers who use msvcrt.

What Operating System is Microsoft’s biggest enemy in the desktop marketplace? Linux, you say? Guess again — it’s good ol’ Windows 98. If you have to ensure that these luddite users upgrade, you’ll need to give them a reason… and ensuring that upgrades to the world’s most popular browser is continually available to them — for free — is an anti-reason, if anything. I expect IE updates to keep coming, including W3C standard chasing; Microsoft spends too much in the W3C for it not to happen. But in future, browser updates are going to come through Windows Update, which as proud paying users of current versions of Windows you will be entitled to use for free.