The more people that dump supporting it the better. Once enough sites break and pop up a "Your browser is too old!" message, it will eventually piss off the right executives to get IE6 dumped out of corporate environment.

An anecdote that you can extrapolate at will. I remember a while back my dad (an EVP at a large chemical company, not exactly bleeding edge IT considering they had Windows 2000 after Vista was out) was astounded to find out YouTube was blocked for most of the employees, but not for him. They started posting instructional videos on YouTube and he only found out because his marketing guys couldn't open the videos they had created. The ban was gone within an hour, after it had been in place for who knows how long.

Enough websites break and you get the executives calling their IT guys saying "why doesn't this work for me, I need a new computer" and eventually things will get changed. In the meantime, a lot of IT departments hunker down and don't want to change anything because people ALWAYS complain when there is change.

Simple truism of office politics - if it is the executives idea it is "great", if it is the IT department's idea, it "sucks", regardless of technical merit.

A more relavant truism to the IE6 in business debacle is that upgrading a platform is costly and enhancing users' web-browsing experience is rarely a top priority.

Actually it's probably an anti-priority more often than a priority. I would not be particularly interested in making surfing the web a more enjoyable experience for my employees. The one thing that will end IE 6 is when Microsoft stops supporting it with security updates. Until then, I expect it to be a significant player in the browser market.

The enforced restriction (your suggestion is more of a passive aggressive one I know) of browsing is an oft cited reason for discontent among my more corporate, non-startup friends.

It seems to me a both an admission of defeat by management and a statement of distrust of employees when it is done.

True. And, I don't really have any employees, nor would I, I hope, work in a field where keeping people on old browsers makes business sense. But there may be such fields, and in those fields I don't see a likely cause of a big investment in technology updates until the old tech is truly untenable.

As XP users upgrade to new hardware they will get Win7 and IE8. This is a another reason why IE6 is finally going down (the others being FF's adoption and the rise of Chrome and Safari + the Mobile web).