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Comment by behringer | Hacker News Reader

There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. What corporation upgraded to make sure their employees could youtube harder?

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I think it likely did. When CEO's and upper management read stories about how doing away with IE6 is better for security, and then remember they use IE6 for certain things internally, that can spur conversations that cause change. Maybe not immediate change, and maybe it has to percolate through company boundaries where enterprises express their dissatisfaction with the tooling provided them if it requires usage of tools widely believed to be insecure and change finally starts happening.

Ultimately, I think top-down change at enterprises is much faster than bottom up, and a national news story is just the sort of thing to spur a lot of top-down changes.

There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube.

Don't underestimate the power of employees to influence employers.

iPhones didn't end up all over the enterprise space because Blackberry walked away from the market.

Did the graph of browser marketshare at the end not mean anything to you? IE6 dropped by half over the next month

Did you see the chart of browser usage correlated with this incident? The only precipitous drop in any browser usage occurred when they launched this banner. It was already on a downward trend, but an immediate drop like that is pretty hard to explain away as anything else.

How many employees lied to their boss or IT staff about needing ie7 to watch you tube harder.

My guess from my time in the trenches is about 1 in 5.

I think it gave people permission to think of IE6 as outdated. It's far easier for a decisionmaker to follow the herd rather than get out in front of him ('nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM/whatever'): convince him that the herd has turned on IE and he'll gladly pitch in.

Whelp, and in this case, nobody got fired, either. Good point!

StatCounter's graph of browser version market share for 2009 doesn't show the same sharp IE6 drop as the YouTube graph. IE6 users probably just switched another browser when they wanted to watch YouTube. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome.

http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined...

I bet plenty of employees upgrade their home computers, though, and eventually started pressuring their IT department to let them use the same modern browsers at work. A CEO asking why they can't have Chrome on their work laptop is sometimes all it takes to get the ball rolling.

From my personal experience corporations didn't officially ditch IE6 until they officially ditched Windows XP. Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP encouraged corporations with expensive support contracts to upgrade their fleet. This resulted in new hardware, new os, and new default browser.

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