The reason in Germany is mainly SAP (because of its popularity here)
Their Netweaver product was build with lots of ActiveX + OS stuff that's so proprietary, that it will not work with even IE7.
Of course SAP has released upgrades but companies have to pay for it or change larger parts of their ERP to be able to apply the upgrades. As ERPs are propably upgraded once per decade, this will take some time...
From various access logs I've analyzed, I can say that Daimler, Merck (the Germany Merck), Bayer, Deutsche Post and some Governments (Bundeszentralamt für Steuern) still run IE6 in wide-scale deployments.
It seems that only view companies provide alternative, modern browsers to their users or the users don't use them and stick with their IE6 default (as they know from SAP Portal) even when browsing externaly.
Working in a ~50000 employee company that shall remain nameless I can give you another datapoint from "big companies" out there:
We only got IE8 (on WinXP, Win7 will not launch for another year or two) this year. And before that it was whatever IE version ships with WinXP.
The alternative we can use is a Firefox that has not been updated since its rollout in 2009. And of course you are not allowed to use other than company-managed software, especially web-browsers are tightly regulated, exceptions granted only for a few chosen employees.
The policy regarding webbrowsers explicitly states that this is done to avoid having people running outdated versions of them...
Here's what I don't get. (Maybe someone here can help answer this.) My company, with 18,000 employees, recently decided to upgrade workstations from IE6 to IE7. It wasn't entirely seamless - employees still had to double-click a desktop icon to kick off the upgrade. What I don't understand is why they upgraded to IE7. Once you're going through the friction of doing an upgrade at all, why not go all the way? Is the retraining coefficient that much more for IE8 (or 9) vs. IE7?
I can't say what happened at your company, but at mine (which is a bit bigger), the IT people started "qualifying" IE7 when it came out. It took them until after IE8 was released to get all the various internal groups working and tested on IE7. The testing part was really the big piece, so they couldn't just jump to IE8 when it was released because it would have meant months or years redoing the testing cycle.
Exactly. My experience at work is that we "bootleg" in other browsers to do dev work on external facing sites, but the intranet stuff really only works on Internet Exploder, and thems the breaks.
While it's laughable, I understand the driving forces behind it, and have since stopped caring, so long as nobody insists that our public sites need only work on IE 6/7/8. I can usually end that discussion with one word: iPad.
Wow that's amazing, sometimes I wonder how IT staff get up in the morning and go to sleep at night. Could it be that they are using some sort of monitoring software that actually utilises the flaws in these out of date browsers?
No, it's because they can't spare support resources for other browsers. If they know the flaws they have to support workarounds for, they keep support to a manageable level.
They could, of course, just hire more support staff, but then their productivity would drop and the CEO would have to shave five feet off the length of his next yacht.
A workforce on an old browser is an awesome way to stagnate innovation. If you complain about this on some sites (ahem...reddit), you will receive replies from thousands of self-loathing IT staffers who will give you a thousand bullshit reasons why supporting even newish browsers is "impossible" for a large company.
In nearly every case, the old browser in the standard image is there because of some terrible legacy software from the late 1990s that: (1) was premised on the notion that the runtime environment would never change, and (2) is licensed from a vendor who charges obscene amounts of money for any change. Either that, or some useless "intranet" that nobody invested in since 1998.
I will never for the life of me understand why these companies don't create desktop shortcuts to the IE6-based tools, and let employees do their other browsing in a newer browser. It comes down to laziness and apathy, and the dynamics of a big company that has matured to the point where too many second-rate, CYA-oriented people infiltrate the ranks of management and operations.
The cost of retraining thousands of non-technical people coupled with the interim hit on productivity is larger than you think. These costs are potentially inflated by CYA attitudes, but they are real.
The reasons aren't mysterious; it may be worth going over here:
1. Windows XP. XP installation media only ever came with IE6, never anything newer. Given the frequency that most corporate workstations get reassigned and wiped and reimaged, IE6 comes out of the reinstallation casket all the time.
2. Intranet systems. For most corporations of size, internal browser-based applications get the company's business done on a daily basis. Optimizing for this case is more important than optimizing for public web browsing. And these apps were written by the lowest-available-cost developers, many in outsourced shops that are long gone, who barely understood anything about the underlying technology and inadvertently rely on all sorts of browser misbehavior and bugs. (Also, the real limitation here is Microsoft-imposed, that you can't easily run multiple versions of IE on the same system, because so much of what we call IE is really integrated operating system components. IE6 for intranet alongside IE8/9 for the public web would be an optimal case but is not practical.)
3. Other browsers do exist. In several large corps I've seen, the policy (unofficial or official) is to use IE6 for the internal apps, and go ahead and install Firefox for public web browsing. The users savvy enough to install Firefox will do so; the users that don't know what a browser version is aren't missing anything.
4. User training. These are the users that will call the helpdesk and complain when their intranet app opens its popup in a tab instead of a new window and they can't find it because the instructions on their Post-it say to click on the window in the taskbar. No IT department wants to deal with that.
5. Cost-benefit, which is really a superset of everything above. There's still no compelling business benefit for most companies to buy Windows 7, so they're still reinstalling XP with IE6 all the time. There's no profitable business plan to be shown for spending time and money upgrading internal apps to work with IE8/9 and retraining users to the new workflow. Remember that these corporations are always in existence to make money. They aren't there to serve some Platonic ideal of everybody using the World Wide Web with the newest technology.
Not too mysterious. Many large corporations have invested $x million in proprietary software where the cost is amortized by the beancounters over a number of years.
Some of this proprietary software was written in ActiveX, VBscript or some other technology that means that the vendor only officially supports it operating under IE6. It might run fine under newer IE versions or other browsers, but doing so would void the support contract with the vendor (which means huge costs).
So the choice is either to spend millions more upgrading it (when it works perfectly fine for business purposes already), or keep everyone on IE6. Most stick with IE6.
It's getting better as the cost of the software gets fully amortized and planned replacement projects start going ahead - but there's still holdouts.
I work with a 50,000+ employee corporation that just got the go-ahead to upgrade employee workstations to IE8 - with the exception of a few departments (x,000 workstations) who are stuck with one of the aforementioned proprietary apps that's more expensive to upgrade than it is to support the users with the crappy browser.
Health care, too. There's an Active X Control, made by GE, used for displaying X-ray imagery, that's bug for bug compatible with IE6. It's expensive and risky for hospital IT departments to upgrade all that stuff.
An open source HTML5 replacement for that application would be interesting and a huge boost to new health care web apps. But it would be hard to convince risk-averse hospital IT people to use it.
Just recently we were dealing with a large corporation that was still using IE6 throughout the company and our web app had to support this browser.