I don't understand. It's right in front of them. "Make IE standards compliant, and your market share will sky rocket!". But instead of doing the obvious they brainstorm cluelessly to try to correct the mistakes the made in IE7. Their only option? To continue to be different, and make IE8 act more like IE6.
"In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way," while in the meantime, "we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant."
But wait: if they already had a standards mode, why did they need to make it more compliant? Answer: because "standards mode" wasn't standard! Now they have to make a "standards standards mode".
This is a nightmare.