Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low" too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get real!
IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because:
a) it's not open-source
b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft
So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.
Microsoft makes gobs of money from ads on Bing searches, just as Google does from Google searches. In the consumer market, Windows share is falling. Google is releasing an OS later this year, Apple's products are obscenely popular. Android is more and more popular every day.
People don't care what OS or browser they're running half the time. The thing is that IE is not an option; it can't be bundled on the most popular smartphones, or the most popular tablets because MS won't let it be.
I'm not suggesting that Gentoo nerds who write web software are going to care; I am suggesting that MS is losing out badly because of their Windows-only attitude. The future is NOT Windows-only software: the future is cross-platform software.
Microsoft is making a big mistake by not allowing anyone to use IE unless they also use Windows.
I use Linux, but I have clients (one large corporate one in particular) that use IE6. This means I need to test against IE6, 7, 8 and soon 9, all of which require their own separate OS to run in, and each of those OS require (in theory) a licence to be purchased from MS.
This means that soon I'll require four Windows licences for an OS I don't use, just to test against each version of IE. All because MS can't make them run side-by-side
Being able to test the browser that is the most "off" when it comes to standards without buying a license of Windows is of course an investment. But the PR would be much better than what happened here.
I don't think anyone seriously expects IE9 to be ported to Linux or even OS X. These questions simply highlight the possibility that Microsoft's strategy of trying to lock users to applications that are locked to the platform could turn out to be a failure. It's another way of saying, "I don't care about Windows, therefore I don't care about IE." This statement seems much more potent today than it was a few years ago.
