I don't have strong opinions on any of this, but that letter really reads weirdly. It has an almost-no-transition set of segues between "congrats for all the work you've done recently", "Sinofsky is leaving", and "so here is who's in charge now", with a conspicuous lack of explanation or connection between those points.

Welcome to corporate damage control 101.

A former co-worker of mine used to occasionally bring up the first company email he received: "Effective immediately, so-and-so (not my coworker, someone from a different department) is no longer employed at <company name>. There will be no further comment on this matter."

Thanks for pointing us to that link. I was surprised & pleased to learn that two women were promoted as a result of Sinofsky's departure: Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller. Good for them, and all of us who enjoy seeing a little more gender balance.

Any MSFT'ers here who can comment on their backgrounds?

Julie Larson-Green brought the Ribbon interface to Office and then to other parts of Windows. Her ability to bring change to something as stable as the Office UI and the Windows Explorer UI was seen as a good thing.

By the way, downvoting instead of writing some counter-argument is not cool.

Anyone else had to pause when reading that line in the letter?

Julie has been a stalwart leader of building compelling “experiences” from her time on Internet Explorer

Well, one definition of "compelling" is "demanding attention". Any web developer that's had to build for Internet Explorer will likely say that's a fairly accurate description.

Ditto.

It seems very weird to put the word "experiences" in quotes. It makes it seem as if the writer is using it sarcastically, or is in some way disclaiming what they are writing. What in the world justifies the quotes, and why wouldn't an editor get rid of them?

I think it's explicitlydrawing the reader's attention to the fact that the author is using the term in a way other than it's common meaning. To be pedantic I think the quotes are unnecessary grandstanding, if you believe in the term then just use it, but whatever.

IE 3 and 4 were very well received in their own time. Its only IE 6 that overstayed its welcome.

And 7 and 8. 9 and 10 are still strutting around non-standard implementations of half of everything require custom code work-arounds. They still don't have full html5 / css3 support either.

How do you fully support a mostly still-moving spec? Also what large points are missing now in IE 10 except for WebGL?

Why do you only ask about "large points"? If you implement 'most of CSS, except for minute details', then you haven't implemented CSS, and web developers suffer because they have to add UA-specific hacks for your implementation.

To answer the first question: The first step would probably be releasing more often than once every 1.5 years.

Unfortunately, MS considers IE a Windows component, so MS supports all versions of IE that was ever released on a version of Windows for the life of that Windows version, which is a minimum of ten years total for each version.