Internet Explorer related trivia

[Mike Hearn]

Well, I thought this statistic might counterpoint the news of Netscapes
final death, and I'm in an odd mood at the moment.

As we might end up cloning large parts of the Internet Explorer
infrastructure someday, it's worth knowing roughly how much Microsoft
invested/lost on it:

   $1.25 billion dollars

This is according to Robert Scoble, who is an "evangelist" for
Longhorn/Windows, so I expect it's mostly accurate.

The figure sounds somewhat stupid, a pinky-to-the-mouth Dr. Evil moment.
If you consider a large team of programmers working on the product for
many years however, it becomes quite believable. Consider that IE
encompasses not only MSHTML, but also things like MLANG, shell
integration, ActiveX, probably elements of WSH and so on. 

I hope somebody finds web browsers interesting around here ;)