Do you have an IE6 Exit Strategy?
Published on January 5th, 2009
Just a thought. If you’re one of those lumbering corporations locked into IE6 through software or IT lock-in or even by the personal choice of a managing director - do you have an IE6 exit strategy? Seriously, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that you’re locked into IE6 the finite life of a browser is a business reality you need to contend with… unless you’re saying in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years you’re going to be running IE6. No, didn’t think so. You need an exit strategy.
Apparently Google are suggesting GMail users move away from IE6 as an unsupported browser to either Firefox or Chrome. IE6 was released on August 12, 2001. End of story.
What businesses need to understand is that this issue will not perpetually disappear behind the argument that this is too expensive to deal with, or because it’s difficult. Yes you’re locked into IE6, but that’s because you made an understandable business error that had a relatively short term view. How were you to know IE6 would become an industry bugbear and other vendors would take over that market space. Yes IE6 is still large on the browser stats of most websites - but it’s going to fail more often and more significantly and eventually it’ll be like hearing about a business still running Netscape 4.7. First shock, then laughter.
My advice for organisations at the beginning of 2009 - sit down and discuss the white elephant. Figure out your IE6 exit strategy. If it’s not this year, will it be next? Or the year after? How will you extricate yourself from your proprietary IE6 software solutions? Time to earn the big dollars, right?
