I do work for a company that targets that sector and we calculate with a user base of about 50% that still use one of those browsers. Yet, we want them to have all the bells and whistles that the web offers today as well. This will change (and is changing) but rather slowly. Some might even say it barely even moves.
As another sorta-related data point, I do know that back in the late 1990s the AOL users also clicked and converted at a higher rate than the Internet in general.
Because we want their business. There's a simple equation here- if you don't support IE6, you lose business from people that use it. For some web sites (such as mine, fortunately) IE6 and IE7 usage is so low that it's a rounding error. A lot of other sites are not so fortunate.
Making your site work in IE6 is one thing... making the experience nice and fast is another... but it's impractical to make sure the pixels that you see in IE6 match the pixels you see in Chrome.
> There's a simple equation here- if you don't support IE6, you lose business from people that use it.
The equation is not so simple after all. And it means that you're responsible for delivering a good UX, not antiquated notions of identical rendering.
I get the counter-argument, but on the whole, I'd rather see IE6,7 and 8 just die. If corporations are too risk-averse to get rid of a clearly-broken tool, why should we help them out?