The Volkswagen Group is using IE6 as standard for displaying web pages

The CMS I maintain at work is not so bad compared to this.

I sometimes wonder why these interfaces are so freaking common for anything not facing the general public.

-PC or MAC with internet connection

-Web Browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is recommended)

So... they mean a (pretty old) PC with internet connection then?

> I didn't realise we could code in SSL.

"Coding" does not solely mean "programming", it also has the meaning of "encoding" in general.

"Coding" is also a mistranslation, fwiw; should be "encoding". I like the number mismatch in that same sentence - data "is" transferred but "are" secured. For computer applications you normally go with data as a mass noun (always singular, like water or corn), but you definitely should be consistent with your choice.

Ugh. This whole thing is causing me bad proofreading flashbacks. I'm leaving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Car companies are focusing on design. They are spending billions on it.

Regarding the Ferrari 458, it can show the current speed as a number while showing the map at the same time.

But to me, it seems car market is very different from consumer electronics. First, building a car is still a hard task, harder than putting transistors together. Second, risk of car failure is much higher than risk of computer failure.

In other words, I would be afraid to ride 120 kmph on a highway if I knew the probability of random failure is as high as on my computer. I can't just backup my life regularly.

edit: OK, I misread your post a little, but I am letting this comment here since I wrote it already

They could ship with a package manager (or "app store", what have you), and offer an API to the car. If they allow competition amongst app makers then usability standards should naturally increase.

Of course it would be necessary for car-makers to set high minimum standards of safety in app design, and to enforce those standards strictly.

I've considered starting a car company around this principle, but the barrier to entry is daunting.

Just one item: in order to cost-compete you need very high volume, and that means putting huge amounts of capital at risk. Automotive engineers care about component pricing at the sub-cent level since volumes are so high.

Except that the interface is... kludgy, at best.

Banking is another example, hence BankSimple. A decent web UI/experience will get them more brand loyalty than a TV ad with ponies. This logic applies across all traditional industry verticals.

even if somebody today put your beloved ipad in a concept, you would still laugh it off in 7 years when/if it got into production.

BMW have had HUD for several years, which overlay speed and turn-by-tun navigation, which are very usable.

You can expect this type of thing in entry and mid level cars within the next 5-10 years, as the current model cycles pan out. Top Gear love to make fun of these features, and indeed some are silly. But the vast majority work well and have a lot of thought behind them. The version 1.0 of all this stuff is already 10 years old.

Early experiments into touch-screen everything have proven to not be popular with the car-buying public. Through experimentation, designers have found that, for important functions (ventilation, radio, etc) a physical button in a known location outperforms a touch screen interface every time. In my case, this is because you can memorize the location and feel of a button and can push it reliably without taking your eyes off the road. You can push it in the dark at night time, and you get tactile feedback.

Touchscreen systems are already here, but will always bury less-used functions like options and navigation, which is designed to be used while stationary, while the more common functions will remain as dedicated push buttons.

Outside of the tech-geek world, function, function and function is prized much more than interesting neat features. Take a test drive with the average car buyer and you'll find that a simple, familiar and well-designed user interface will trump a tech-fest every time. While there is a lot of technical interest in 'carputers' the general public won't ever really warm to them. The big sales winners are in things like self-parking and parking cameras/sensors, accident avoidance and other passive safety systems.

Although even in 2009 I still wouldn't recommend IE6.

They are giving the unexperianced wrong information and making them misinformed. If they want to help the unexperianced, they shouldn't tell them that a secure experience can be guaranteed with IE6. They should encourage them to use modern browsers which are still regularly supported with security patches.