Microsoft's data-driven black hole
Microsoft has the telemetry religion; the development of IE 9, like Windows 7 and Office before it, is driven by data about what people actually do. In IE 9's case, it's things like a list of the 7,000 programming APIs that are in use on the most popular Web sites (the most popular JavaScript API, incidentally, used in 91% of them extracts a substring from a string).