Just look where the money is: they didn't list stats for ad clicks but I'm willing to bet IE6 users click more than their share of ads, and Firefox users less.

That's actually an quite interesting notion. I'd like to see digg show the ad clicks for each browser.

For many people out there Windows and IE were the first and the only. Those were the symbols of a computer and internet. It's hard to give up on a symbol, right?

Also, while FF was gaining traction among SOHO users, the large corporation defaulted (and still do) to IE, for various reasons. For many of them, it was unthinkable for IE to be replaced by any contender. And even should it get replaced, they want to be compatible with the large body of other corporations sticking to IE.

Last but not least, the typical web developer of this day is well capable of developing correct FF code. It wasn't necessarily the case years ago.

I take it you met these people inside corporate IT or other isolated development shops because I've not seen much of that attitude on public blogs and such. However if I imagine such a Microsoft-centric web developer for a second, I'm pretty sure they would be pushing for IE7 and dropping IE6 as quick as they can.

You might be surprised. Keep in mind that developing for IE6 isn't necessarily difficult if you don't care about standards compliance or cross-browser compatibility. In a corporate environment where IT is a cost center, it's often acceptable to support only a single browser company-wide if it means saving money.

Also, a lot of corporate IT shops are not doing anything particularly interesting technology-wise, and have already built IE6-compatible frameworks that make most of the front-end web development they need to do easy enough. On the other hand, upgrading to IE7 would mean exhaustive testing of all existing applications, and the support of "the business" to expend resources on the project. It's much easier to do nothing for as long as possible.

Just to add another data point - I work for a SaaS company serving the financial industry, and 25% of our user base is still on IE6. (We still have major clients running Windows 2000 too, but that's another story.)