[angersock]

Which companies? Give us some names--that's why I'm proposing this list.

We always, always hear the same threadbare stories about mythical magical enterprise customers that can't/won't upgrade, and the little tail wags the dog, and the life for the rest of us is made harder.

All this for a use case which is basically hearsay and rumors.

As for inexperienced developers--I'll go and say that the experience I've had of watching bad compilers and system headers and christ only knows what else force native code to get uglier and uglier and less maintainable are what motivate me to try and discourage the same mistakes in Happy Web Land.

The web is barely twenty years old, arguably much younger--let's at least try and avoid sins we don't have to commit.

Edit: Or, you know, downvote me without explanation. That's pretty cool too.

[mkopinsky]

I work at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, NY. Much of what I do is building intranet web apps. About a year ago they upgraded (yes, upgraded) to IE7. We have 18,000 employees, but let's say we have 10,000 computers. Upgrading all of those computers, verifying that all of the hundreds of apps provided by dozens of vendors used in scores of departments is a huge and expensive project. Healthcare in NYC is a business that earns you a margin of - if you're lucky - 1%. It is difficult to justify the cost

Note that I'm not a decision maker - in fact, I'm not even in the IT department. Please don't try to argue this with me, as I may be totally wrong about what their decision factors even were. Personally, my life would be much easier if they would upgrade, but I can understand why they have not.

[silverbax88]

No one working at that level is going to disclose their customers and the technology agreements they have. That would be business suicide (and would ruin lives). Again, this isn't mom and pop shop level stuff.

But I will give you a clue. Go find a list of the top 10 biggest banks in the United States. It's almost all of them. Then go find the biggest credit card companies. It's most of them.

[angersock]

Sounds like a plan--didn't mean to come off as a jerk; you probably grok what I'm getting at. Thanks!

[timjahn]

Have you ever walked into a Chase branch and noticed they're running IE as they browse through your bank account, and wonder why such insanely sensitive, secure information is being run through IE?

Find me a bank that doesn't run IE, for that matter. I'm a Chase customer, so I can only confirm them. But I honestly wonder how many banks don't run IE.

[philbarr]

The problem is that some of these big companies outsource their IT. They don't want to upgrade from, say, IE6 because they know it's going to cost them a FORTUNE.

I know of at least 2 big blue chip companies with this problem.

In fact, I once had a requirement that the software we write have it's own independant auth mechanism and NOT be linked to Active Directory, "because it costs us thousands every time we ask to add a user or change a role".