Unfortunately it's not a matter of sticking fingers in your ears, I can tell you. If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project.

Still you gotta catch up at some point. The product I work on is dropping IE8 in January, which will cause some of our larger and less nimble customers to get stuck on an older version until they can fix their browser situation.

"If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project."

So... don't upgrade IE, but give people the option of - you know - running another browser. The IT folks can even lock it down so no one can do anything useful with it, but they could give people firefox, chrome, safari or opera as another tool on their desktop.

Holding back an entire company's ability to do any modern browsing because you're still tied to one HR intranet app from 2003 is just silly. There's no sane argument to be made for it, in light of the short- and long-term opportunity costs it imposes.

A nasty situation no doubt, but manageable. What I would do is:

0. Rename IE to 'intranet'. 1. Configure IE to only access Intranet. 2. Switch everyone to chrome/firefox, keep bookmarks, etc 3. Hire some university students to temp man the support line as you are flooded with support requests.

As I said a nasty situation. Perhaps it would be best to spread a rumour that someone was fired thanks to IE. That way you are not evil IT getting in the way of everyone's job.

It isn't sticking fingers in ears, it is yelling at business that software can not be treated like vending machines where you buy one model that lasts decades on end regardless of what new revisions come out. The vulnerabilities and inefficiencies of the old IE browsers are detrimental to the businesses that are resisting change, and the entire web supporting the bad habit is why change doesn't come.

People won't switch because sites are hectoring them with lectures about how something they might be fine with is actually awful. All it would take for them to switch are compelling apps (whatever definition of "compelling" applies to each person) which exploit the capabilities of, and therefore require, the newer browsers, and whose existence is advertised to them. Not "your browser is bad and you should feel bad", but "this site is awesome and will make you feel awesome, there's just one thing - you need to install this awesome browser to get your ticket to awesomeville". Same as any other platform.

> They are only used if the person using them doesn't know what a browser is.

...or their company doesn't have the budget to upgrade their entire department to Windows 7.