Sure, IE's marketshare may be shrinking - however, will the drop in marketshare really be enough to give an incentive for a mass exodus from IE?

Average Joe will probably be using Internet Explorer for Windows, and he definitely doesn't care about web standards (nor does he probably know what they are, anyways). If you tell him to download a different browser, he'll simply shrug off your suggestion, since he believes that he'll be inconvenienced by the fact that he has to download...a different browser.

In order to change the future of web standards to a much more optimistic one, we, the coders, designers, developers, etc. must perform some kind of action. We must evangelize web standards, and educate other coders, and even users, about them. Eventually, users will have an incentive to change their browsers, simply on the basis that their favourite pages won't work in IE anymore.

It won't be the users who will directly cause the change. It will be us, the ones who actually use these standards. We have a 2-3 year timeframe before Longhorn comes out; the opportunity to increase the efforts to spread the word is now.