A few weeks ago, I said on this blog that Microsoft should/could be more disruptive in the browser's world. During the W3C Technical Plenary Meeting in the south of France a couple of weeks ago, I said what I had in mind : dropping the implementation of a proprietary rendering engine and moving to an open-source engine like Gecko or WebKit. It was greeted with smiles. You know, the kind of smiles that mean "tssss, yet another glazmanism...". Not everyone smiled though.

Steve Ballmer was recently in Sydney, Australia and a student asked him a "cheeky" question:

"Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?"

Steve Ballmer's answer:

"Open source is interesting, Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

Guess who's smiling now ?...