I understand where you are coming from. I used to run IT at a company, and had to make many of these "awful" decisions. Being given a budget of $10k to upgrade computers for 30 people, and a server -- there's not a whole lot you can do.

It is very hard to upgrade a platform in a company, I'm not saying it isn't. Also, as IT you are required to inherit all the problems of everyone at the company when it comes to using a computer.

I do, however, feel it is the job of IT to pitch as hard as they can to management. They should explain how outdated IE6 really is. How many mainstream sites have already dropped support. If there is a legacy application that requires IE6 to run, it probably isn't being maintained well.

It should be the job of IT, if it makes sense, to push for these types of changes.

It was wrong of me to say IT is lazy if you still have IE6, I should have said the company doesn't have it's head on straight.

If you have 30 employees, and their computers slow them down by approximately 10%. Every week (assuming an average 50k salary each) this is costing the company about $3k every week in productivity (given quite a few assumptions).

At a very minimum, why can't employees use an alternate browser? If it is such a problem to get, lets say Chrome, on company computers -- maybe there's a way to fix that (besides installing the Chrome Frame in IE6).

While it may be easier to continue to support IE6 / XP, I feel any company still looking to use IE6 as a primary browser should take a second look. That shouldn't necessarily be at IT, but whatever restriction isn't allowing a company to upgrade to free software almost 10 years later.

As a web developer, I hate supporting IE6. It lacks so many things that make the web a better place today (poor CSS support, no PNGs -- yes there are fixes).

I've found it depends on your target demographic. If you are looking at business people, IE6 is still in the ballgame. Offices are still lagging behind in their conversion to modern browsers. This is probably because the IT staff just doesn't care.

In talking with user groups, I've heard people say (frequently) that they prefer Firefox or Chrome at home, but at work aren't allowed to install those browsers -- so they are forced to use IE6 during work hours.

Google is making a great move right here -- at least the theoretical move (and if they're not, hopefully they're reading these articles).

What is everyone saying right now? Virtually across the board -- applications via a web browser are the next thing. Essentially making desktop computers thin clients if you follow the current trend. Example applications? Gmail, maps.google, any map site, the theoretical google / open office solution, microsofts Office live, and the hottest area in web development currently - AJAX.

The current elegant and simple implementations probably aren't that way because they are cool (although they definitely are). Gmail opened google onto the world as a fast text based engine, where processing and data resided server side and a client only requested a very small percentage of their X GB of storage at a time.

maps.google took the "web application" another step, with streaming multimedia, and was vastly successful. Sitting on maps.google sometimes you still have a slight lag downloading the surrounding image tileset.

Imagine this trend projected over the course of the next X years, we're looking at the greatest business model, subscription based, distributed over the web, applications when you need them where you need them.

Now, how does this generate profit? With the projected path of google, they will essentially be the intermediary of all global knowledge and communications. Whether you look at it as good or bad, google is trying to become the world broker of information.

The interesting part, at what cost? Traditionally this is free to us -- I mean, google is nice right?

Think broadcast television, why would people provide content free to the viewers? Advertising. Google will know more about what we see, how we see it, and why we see it than we will even probably know. This will shoot google beyond any and all of the advertising venues currently available.

One key google technology that I think we have overlooked, but shows an amazing future capability, was the speech seearch engine a few years back. Remember calling the number, saying something, and getting the results on your screen? That disappeared -- but now look at where google can advertise.

Print -- the web is the future of "print", video -- now supported by an amazingly powerful network, perhaps googleTV types of things, audio -- they won't stop with skype going the way of ebay -- imagine paying for a phone call with a targeted advertisement at the end of a conversation based on what you just talked bout, communications . . the sky is the limit.

THe question is will they fall to "the dark side"..