What's weird though is that they have a consortium. They could have all agreed simultaneously to stop issuing SHA1 certs years ago and at no market loss. But they didn't.
The Chrome team are right to push this along, but I do have some sympathy for the CA's here too. I read the whole discussion and it's pretty clear that there was some epic miscommunication going on here. Notably Google thinks that removing the padlock icon is not "deprecation" according to the timetable Microsoft established, but all the people buying certs disagree; that's why they're doing it.
No improvement? How about improvement in security?