Lack of good HTML5 is just Microsoft being Microsoft. There always was the standard way and the Microsoft way.
IE has gotten better since then.
W3C: And the winner of the HTML5 conformance test is ... IE9! | ZDNet
In response to your "Microsoft being Microsoft" statement I would say they are in a "damned if they support more HTML5 and damned if they support less HTML5 " type situation. Let me explain:
Firstly, HTML5 as a standard is still under development. It isn't finished and will be modified going forward. Secondly, IE is the most widely used browser in corporate intranets, and any features added to IE instantly become a pseudo-standard, as those features get deployed within many corporate environments. So, if Microsoft were to support the entire HTML5 standard, and enterprises were to deploy those features that would later get modified by the W3C standards body, what kind of a mess would that put Microsoft in? Either IE would be declared a non-standard/outdated HTML5 browser, or Microsoft would update IE thereby forcing their customers to spend billions on updating their own websites to achieve HTML5 compliance. Both of those options are very bad. As a result, Microsoft's approach is to limit their support of HTML5 to what seems stable and wait for the rest of the specification to mature. Many of the other browsers don't need to worry about such issues. They are free to support and modify whatever they want at almost any time. Basically, this comes down to the difference between enterprise and consumer software.
This is Microsoft's current predicament. Ten years ago, with IE6, they intentionally got themselves into that kind of a mess which was stupid, but they have learned a lot since then.
Windows 7 was there to repair the mistakes they did with Vista, so I almost never add Vista in a discussion about Windows hahaha
Wrong. Windows 7 was required mainly because Microsoft realized Vista would never recover from its reputation. From a low-level technical point of view, Vista was the most important update to Windows ever. Much of what we value today wouldn't have been possible without the low level engineering efforts that lead to Windows Vista... Windows RT and WP8 are just some examples. Vista's single biggest problem were hardware vendors who failed to deliver functional drivers in time (nVidia was one of the worst as their difficulties impacted millions of people). Basically, it was a very good and absolutely necessary evolution of the Windows OS, hampered by terrible 3rd party driver support and one ill conceived concept called UAC. Of course the tech media completely fails to understand this, so lots of FUD gets passed around as a result. Internally, Windows 7 is almost identical to Vista, the main difference being that hardware vendors had gotten their drivers working reliably by the time Windows 7 arrived.
Really I don't know why so many people are behind that guy who just keeps dragging the company down...
IMHO you are again letting know-nothing media types influence your opinion too strongly, just like you did with your thread about Nokia going under (at least I think that was you, sorry if I'm mistaken).
The main reason Balmer is the #1 most "hated" CEO, is because Microsoft's stock value has been more or less flat during the last decade. Wall Street analysts love to hate Microsoft for that reason. But is that really what we as consumers should care about? If you own Microsoft stock, fine, otherwise you can basically ignore that part of the argument which accounts for 80% of the negativity floating around on the web. I'm not saying Balmer is the greatest CEO of all time. He certainly isn't a visionary and he isn't really a software guy, but calling him the worst CEO of all time is completely ridiculous. Anyone saying as much deserves a royal kicking in the rear end and should be reminded of the CEO's of AIG, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Worse? Really?