I think a difficulty seeing a catastrophic is because YouTube is not valuable to businesses[1] and when your income source is more distributed (no large contracts) there are less chances to really shoot yourself in the foot. You have to piss off all your customers in a way that - really - you should probably see coming.
[1] I don't mean to deride the service, but it didn't have any commercial tie ins at this point worth mentioning, stuff like professional streamers and hosted partnerships with IP holders came later, at this point they were interesting in pop-culture but not a tool for making money.
Given that IE6 was one of the worst pieces of software in all of human history, there was never likely to be a significant downside.
The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.
Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued?
> Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.
I can imagine catastrophes. But they're mostly the sorts of catastrophes that are bad for an organization, but great for a civilization.
> This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.
Something we don't hear about if it fails, but produces a great social benefit if it succeeds seems like exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.