Reasons for "why" not often discussed: 1) Vista consumed the top systems devs at Microsoft for seven years 2) the IE team wasn't "disbanded" so much as loyal to management at Microsoft that was discarded (Brad Silverberg, David Cole) 3) enterprise customers were plenty happy with IE6 4) the dotcom bust quieted the indie developer ecosystem 5) Microsoft honestly thought they could get NT kernels + .NET on small devices and leverage massive developer support and existing tooling in the late 90s.
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Reasons for "why" not often discussed: 1) Vista consumed the top systems devs at Microsoft for seven years 2) the IE team wasn't "disbanded" so much as loyal to management at Microsoft that was discarded (Brad Silverberg, David Cole) 3) enterprise customers were plenty happy with IE6 4) the dotcom bust quieted the indie developer ecosystem 5) Microsoft honestly thought they could get NT kernels + .NET on small devices and leverage massive developer support and existing tooling in the late 90s.