Does Microsoft's supporting HTML5 make any difference?

Microsoft General Manager announced a few days back that Microsoft understands the power of HTML5 and considers it the future of web. Although its a big news, "Microsoft supporting HTML5" but still, does it matter? Looking at the IE dominated web browser market, it doesn't seem that things are going to get better for HTML5 any time soon.

The web browser usage data shows that family of IE still owns around 54% of the web and it should be noted that none of them supports HTML5. Microsoft's upcoming browser, IE9, will support HTML5 but it won't be available for XP, which is used by approximately 53% of the Internet users. And we all are well aware of the way Microsoft's latest products are adopted by users. IE6, released in 2001 and probably the oldest web browsing technology being used on Earth, still holds around 10% of the web browser market. So, assuming that 53% XP users are not going to go away in a few years shouldn't be wrong.

These XP users are the Internet crowd that will be deprived of HTML5. I am not denying the fact that they may still be using other HTML5 supporting browsers - Firefox, Opera etc. But these users probably exist because they are aware of open-source technologies but the growth of no. of such users is still slow. Although I believe this is the only way(spreading awareness) we can bring people to leave crappy old technologies.

Actually people using old tech. is not the only thing hindering adaption of HTML5. Even if people become aware of HTML5 and start using an HTML5 supporting browser, they will still face trouble because of this fragmented HTML5 support among various browsers.

Web-Browser support checklist

So, basically it seems that Microsoft's going for HTML5 apparently won't affect the growth of HTML5 drastically. So, probably most of the web apps made in the next few years would still be focused on flash and would lack support for HTML5 and CSS3. A while back I wrote about a Forrester research, showing how HTML5 will take some good time to capture a majority of web and this seems to be pretty true now.