"Microsoft" is not some uniform entity. The people who perpetrated this mis-design aren't necessarily related to the decision makers who steered IE/Office/Windows to have the EEE behavior.
Not a uniform entity, but a real entity with real habits of behavior. You don't have to attribute any malice to the "people who perpetrated this mis-design", Microsoft's bureaucratic structure might just be designed in a way that EEE strategies arise organically. If they people who drove the use of that strategy with older software were rewarded, and held up as examples within the organization, their ideas could be permanently embeded in the nature of the organization itself.
