Microsoft is deliberately letting Internet Explorer lose the browser market to Mozilla's Firefox.

Microsoft won't admit this publicly but it makes sense. The company hasn't had a major upgrade to the program in years. It was relatively trivial for Mozilla, descended ultimately from Netscape, to match those features, even go slightly beyond them.

The question is why.

The answer is liability.

Microsoft has learned, to its financial cost, that leadership carries with it a requirement to fix bugs. And there are more bugs in Explorer than there were in Dreamworks' Antz.

Microsoft doesn't mind fixing bugs in Windows or in Office. It can get its money back from users for that work through upgrades. But, in order to beat Netscape in the 1990s Microsoft never attached a business model to Explorer. It was given away.

In the last few years leadership has evolved away from the browser. It was once thought that the browser would be a platform, like an operating system, and control of that browser would define Internet applications.

This turned out not to be the case. Once a standard method was developed for "plugging in" other applications to the browser, control issues passed to those applications. Applications like Media Player (in Microsoft's case).

So that is where it's putting its money, in Media Player. There are business models that can be built around Media Player. You can sell content through that conduit.

Until someone creates a business model around browser dominance Explorer is dead.