[mgkimsal]

"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.