On a different note, I think their strategy of using Silverlight to enhance the experience, and degrading gracefully to cross-platform/browser HTML+CSS+JS when it's not available is brilliant.

Brilliantly evil, perhaps. All these stupid problems moving off IE6 have been because of people using, then relying on, proprietary, non-standard additions to the browser. It seems like a good idea at the time; a few years later it's an albatross around your neck.

So here we are, a few years later - lesson learnt? Hardly. The "solution" to losing IE6's proprietary, non-standard additions to the browser is to use another proprietary, non-standard addition to the browser. Wonderful. In 6 years time they'll be going through the whole process again - finally we can dump silverlight!. Perfect for MS, of course, they couldn't care less as long as you're still using Windows.

Anyway, luckily consumer web developers did learn the lesson, which is why Silverlight will never achieve any real penetration in the consumer market.

For some things, using RIA frameworks eases development massively and lets you do stuff which would take ages to do in plain HTML/JS. Google themselves said Google Wave took around 2 years to make. Do you think it would have taken that much time using non-HTML technology?

I'm not saying sticking to plain HTML/JS isn't admirable, but sometimes it's just not very practical.

Also in this case it isn't required, so your potential scenario about being "stuck" with it doesn't really apply.in any meaningful way. In fact they have done just as you said, but given people the option to use a plugin to make things better. It degrades by default, which is helluva lot better than most sites out there.

I don't see you cursing Flash in the same way as you do Silverlight in. What makes Adobe Flash any better?

I'm pretty sure internally the MS developers have been cursing IE6 for a long time, and that they have finally gotten the approval for ditching support.

Hyperbole:

>>Everyone should ditch IE6 support. Screw those who don't know how to install software. Heck, just give IE6 users a blank page with no explanation. let them suffer for their ignorance. No wait even better, redirect IE6 users to porn sites and claim it's a bug in IE6.

Sorry, dude. Computer science and modern technology would not exist if the attitude was: "screw those who dont know how to use this, lets just offend them instead!". Music does that subversively, and predictably perfectly; people living as pop culture personas do not; neither have an important place in the advancement of either the study, or the application of computer science.

Honestly:

* Would pac-man be a hit if it had a button with instructions? If it kept the money of people who did not know how to use the button?

* Can all of your relatives "do the google" even though its not HTML 4.0 strict?

And another:

>> Seriously: any CTO/CIO who makes his organization use Microsoft web stuff, be it Sharepoint or Outlook Web Access or ASP.NET, it doesn't matter, should be fired and be registered on a worldwide "IT offender registry" so we can look up the name and not hire them ever again.

Right.

Lets rephrase that: Seriously: any X who Y, be it A or B [or [...]], it doesn't matter, should be fired and be registered on a worldwide $REGISTRY so we can look up the name and not hire them ever again.

Corporations employ a lot more people than just IT and tech savvy types. The phrase I hear from BA's and Executives is: "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."

Hypothetical question: Do you think Warren Buffet gives a fuck if every flunkie in his rank uses a macpro, or if his personal site runs django on postgres with memcached?

Most large companies currently using windows are much older than the commonplace web, and most companies large enough for IT budgets and CTO/CIO positions are not anywhere near 100% web technology based. If cutting-edge software technology is not _integral_ to the company, then anyone in charge of a budget will choose being able to hire someone for a job versus having to train a new hire to use their proprietary, or unsupported software. Computers are complex things, and any piece of software that isnt preloaded and only consists of a single button people do not have to push will require _training_. The benefit to everyone in the management chain who can approve of someone who can perform a higher level task using excel will be given excel because anything else will be getting in the way of what they are being _paid_ _to _do_.

Switching to Macs for every employee of a large company is prohibitively expensive, and would still require microsofts office suite to be fully compatible with exchange or any interoperability of _anyone above them_ in the management hierarchy.

Linux is simply not ready.

Like it or not, Microsoft develops, sells, and supports _the_ standard for business applications. PM's, analysts and executives _do not care_ what license a piece of software is, because they do not know, or want to know, what a kernel, package, dependency, distro, or anything else is. They want to do their job, and having to learn something that is not 100% interoperable with what everyone else has wastes their time checking compatibility, like webdevs time is wasted checking for ie6 compatibility.

The fact that people are trained to use microsoft means that any non-microsoft software will require an overhead of training for otherwise capable people, who will also be reliant on continuing support not only for an unfamiliar piece of software, but for an unfamiliar operating system.

This may be a benefit to small startups, focused on using a particular piece of technology, and getting people who are either familiar or willing to learn new things, but for every one of them, there are literally _millions_ of people who want to go to work on time, do what they already know how to do, and go _home_.

A lot of capable software engineers are like that, too.

In the end, PM's need to write press releases and status updates with lists and broad stats in word and email them reliably to the appropriate people and lists; the analysts want to import data into excel and use the excel macros they learned at business school to make the numbers as impressive as they can so they can make charts with lots of arrows pointing up; and the executives want to be able to paste those emails into their regular powerpoint deck with the list of popular buzz-adverbs so they can show them throughout the chain-of-all-hands to the technical grunts so they can mumble about what a travesty it is that a modern IT department would have the gall to use windows.

(disclaimer: debian, fluxbox, rxvt, zsh, emacs, JAPH, FF, strt.up&&CORPORATE; exp., devils advocate)

(p.s.currently posting from Notepad with Chrome on a Vista laptop. I also had to spend an hour sitting through the 9 mandatory shutdown updates because I wanted to restart because the computer was running so freaking slow coming out of hibernation)

(edit: formatting)

They've been using IE6 as the anchor that doesn't let the web sail away and now they drop it like a dead weight to the bottom of the ocean just to push their agenda forward and get an early advantage over office suites online.

But you know what? we've been rowing the oars without their help pushing that heavy anchor with us as we move forward.