People are upset because they wanted to be part of the elite club that maybe possibly would have had their DNT header honored, but now that it's likely that a huge percentage of other people on the web will have the header enabled, suddenly the header will be useless for sure.
If this header would have only been useful if it was only enabled by a small set of people, then it has always been stupid, and is in no way Microsoft's fault. Imagine a perfect world where everyone using IE organically decided to poke around in their browser settings, find, understand, and enable DNT. Are the trackers now somehow less justified when they ignore it in this perfect world? No, the motivator is the same — they want to track as many people as possible and "disabled by default" is just a thin excuse. People that are defending the idea of trackers ignoring DNT because of IE are engaging in some weird kind of corporatism.
If this header would have only been useful if it was only enabled by a small set of people, then it has always been stupid, and is in no way Microsoft's fault. Imagine a perfect world where everyone using IE organically decided to poke around in their browser settings, find, understand, and enable DNT. Are the trackers now somehow less justified when they ignore it in this perfect world? No, the motivator is the same — they want to track as many people as possible and "disabled by default" is just a thin excuse. People that are defending the idea of trackers ignoring DNT because of IE are engaging in some weird kind of corporatism.