It's not really about all those enterprise-y intranet sites that "only" work on IE6. It's likely that the amount of effort necessary to make those sites work on IE8 is, on average, not that great. The problem is more the environment those sites were created in. Hidebound, fear-based bureaucracy combined with very little development talent.<p>Most such sites are burdened by crushing change-control processes. Those change-control processes exist as a somewhat reasonable bulwark against the very real harm that an unskilled, talentless development team (which, sorry to say, is the norm in the enterprise) lead by unsophisticated, incompetent management can do. This creates a double-whammy for corporations who want to move away from IE6. In principle the work may not be that difficult or extensive, but the dev. team may be too incompetent to even be aware of what the right work is or what the risks are, and the testing process alone would be extremely costly and time consuming. Not to mention the tricky cross-coordination between multiple teams that may be required. It's a perfect storm of just the sorts of things that can halt enterprise-y organizations in their tracks.<p>Note that the even bigger problem of updating all of the sites on the web so they worked in more modern browsers (even back in the day a multi-billion dollar problem) has already largely been solved. Because site owners knew they had no choice so they rationally invested enough effort into keeping up with the times as was necessary. It's not the size of the problem, it's the capability of the people and organizations tasked with solving it that's the problem.