Lack of competition for Internet Explorer got us the lost decade – Microsoft was perfectly happy with the web not being competitive with unportable desktop apps.
Was that the "lost decade" when we got LinkedIn, Skype, Second Life, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Pandora, Twitter and many of the other things on which we now depend?
Read the comment I was replying to and note that it says “web technology” rather than “web sites”. While people built some great things they did so with significant limitations and had to use features which were not standardized. XmlHttpRequest is a great example – it was used by most of the sites you mentioned but wasn't even submitted as a standard for a full 7 years after it first shipped.
See comment from jordanlev above: "Also hints at the idea that the stability of IE6 for a while actually created a good environment for innovation in the web app space to take place"
2. Note that immediately before your quote, he made the same point I made: “Microsoft intentionally let IE6 development come to a halt because it was no longer strategically beneficial to them”.
3. In addition to reversing your earlier position on the first point, you never stated anything like his second point – just a tangent from the topic in question. You could have fleshed it out into something similar but never did.
4. There's potentially an interesting discussion about the benefits of API stability but that's not conclusively proven – there are many confounds – and there's a separate question of actually specifying behaviours and fixing bugs in the various in-the-wild-versions. As anyone who was working on the web in that era remembers even IE6 wasn't reliably a single target since key features depended on the combination of Windows patches installed on the client. There would have been zero downside had Microsoft more aggressively promoted updates so IE would consistently support HTTP compression, SSL, caching, etc. rather than marking them as minor updates.
