[heresy]

I don't buy this argument, I think Microsoft's development structures are the cause of their slow release cycle, and "enterprise customers" is a convenient excuse for the slowness.

Enterprises happy to go along with this argument, so they can claim to do all this browser and internal app testing approaching NASA levels.

Yeah, right.

When last were the APIs used by "enterprise customers" revved? IE6?

[CWuestefeld]

There are breaking changes upgrading from IE6 to IE7.

Believe me, I don't like supporting customers on IE6. But the fact is that the very same lumbering behemoths that won't move also happen to be the same 800-lb gorillas that can authoritatively say "support us or we take our business elsewhere", and we have little choice but to comply.

[thwarted]

Exactly where else are they going to take their business? When it comes down to it, it has to be cheaper, or the roughly the same order of magnitude, to support an upgrade to a single application than it is to completely throw out your platform and replace it with another.