Customers also ask us to solve the hard problems that they are facing. When we began work on Internet Explorer 4.0, there was no notion of a DOM committee or a DOM standard. If there had been no innovation in that case, there would have been no standards. There are many other examples where smaller innovations have led to other changes and enhancements to other standards efforts. The standards committees are not where the innovation comes from.
Innovation comes mostly from real industry experience.
The experience of innovation, and trying to solve new problems, leads to the creation of better specifications that are based on real customer needs. Some of the innovations that we've led on, such as data binding and dynamic properties, haven't yet made it into a standard. Each of the new customer-driven technologies that we introduce with Internet Explorer is discussed with the appropriate standards groups. Sometimes there is progress, and these features are added. In other cases, there isn't standardization.