These mythical IT departments could quite easily allow for a modern browser to be installed alongside IE6, so that users could continue to access legacy applications while enjoying a modern experience on the rest of the web.
Sorry, but there truly is no (good) excuse for any IT dept to restrict users to IE6.
As a developer, in some organizations, you can't install anything on your own machine. So, you can't get your software to work on Firefox, for example. All your software simply has to work on the company standard browser. The idea is that you'll deal with it later...and 8 years later...
The solution I see is to start to charge more for an IE6 compatible version of any Web software (and charge for the IE6 compatible version in the cases when the software is normaly free).
P.S. I wish IE6 would die in a fire.
(This is not surprising to me, because I know that if I worked for a company that only allowed IE6, the last thing I would want would be for developers to perpetuate my misery by continuing to support it.)
If someone can actually tell me the name of a major corporation that only allows IE6 to be installed on its workstations, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing it.
I worked there for 4 years. As a developer, I was able to install other browsers (that was against the company IT policy, but I didn't care). When I was working on the business side, though, I didn't have admin access to my machine, and so I had to use IE6, like everyone else.
All the internal apps were built to work on IE6, too. And there are a lot of internal apps. Half of them wouldn't display properly on Firefox when I tried opening them there (this was a few years ago, I didn't try Chrome or Safari).
You can't install IE7 or 8 alongside 6 and no other "modern browser" has any kind of reasonable group policy management support or administrative control over updating or extension policies.
Virtualize what, how, and how does that help?
I can see terminal services running published IE6 for legacy apps with desktops having IE8 on them and doing that as a workaround to have side by side, but where would virtualisation help?
Assuming "You can't install IE7 or 8 alongside 6"
You can virtualise Windows XP on Windows 7 and run both browsers. This alleviates pain and provides for legacy apps that rely on 6.
Of course, infinitely better to just ditch IE completely and the dependent apps, and simply write that off [amortizing against future pain]