IE6 Retirement Home? | The Coffeehouse

LeoDavidson

MS (like everyone else I suspect) do eventually force updates on people by discontinuing support (unless an extended support contract is paid for, and those are expensive enough to strongly encourage companies to upgrade).

(EDIT: I may have confused the names of "extended" support and "custom" support. See Larry Osterman's post two below and the page he links to for a more accurate description.)

I think it was this which finally convinced the last big company I worked for to get off their behinds and upgrade from NT4 to XP. Smiley (That was a couple of years before Vista came out. They didn't avoid Vista on purpose.)

(This is a place which still uses the crime against computer science known as Lotus <spit> Notes for their email so you can imagine they're reluctant to upgrade their non-business software no matter how much pain it causes people every day.)

Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)

In reply to vesuvius

#Jul 17th @ 1:32 PM

Well, if it's in the EULA that Microsoft is not responsible for loss of business profit through the use of their software, and I'm pretty sure that's in there, Microsoft has nothing to fear from them. Pretty much. Also, 'Company' can not install the security update, and thus keep their IT systems vulnerable to threats in trade for a working outdated (which is probably vulnerable anyway) software infrastructure.

And that post has no Microsoft watermark, because the C9 team has to mark the accounts as MS employee accounts.

Larry Osterman

In reply to joechung

#Jul 11th @ 12:50 AM

I'm actually not sure that MSFT has to do mainline support forever. IIRC extended support for XP ends in 2014, and Server 2003 ends in 2015 which means that after that time the only supported route is through a custom support agreement. After that, MSFT will still support IE6 but it won't be on MSFT's dime.

Whether or not web sites will be able to remove support for IE6 before then is up to the web site author.