This presumes that Wave will be compelling enough to IE users that they will finally install a different browser. My prediction: it won't be. But I hope I'm wrong.
I've used Google docs once, a few months ago. And that one time, everyone was stepping on everyone else's edit. The end result was making it read only for everyone except one or two people to edit.
Personally, I'm not ignoring it. I'm intentionally choosing not to use it.
It's used, but it's not the enormous wave that Gmail was. There's no way Google Wave is ignored, but there's every chance it becomes useful only to power users and niche groups, just like how Google Docs isn't viewed as a competitor to Microsoft Word.
Not that anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, but I know nobody who uses Google docs. Absolutely nobody. In fact the only place I see this mentioned as a real competitor to anything is on reddit and HN.
Whoever I know who needs a Office-suite and doesn't want or have access to Microsoft Office just installs OpenOffice.org instead.
There is simply no way to claim that Google Docs has hit the mainstream, not even among so called power-users. I very much respect Google Docs on the technical merits of actually making it work, but I just prefer a local desktop application for this kinda work.
Google docs isn't a replacement for office apps, in my opinion. The main benefit, to my mind anyway, is that it allows for super easy collaboration across the internet. It takes so few clicks to create a document and share it with a few people.
IE6 must die, anyone that tried to develop a webapp and make it compatible with IE6 knows the pain. It is broken and orders of magnitude slower than any other browser.
The are not trying to kill IE, they are just trying to fix this. Any attempt to make IE6 users upgrade is good for them and for the developers
Those who see this as a move somehow "against Microsoft" should realize that nothing would please Microsoft better than to no longer have to support IE6.
So why doesn't Microsoft just announce that they will no longer be supporting IE6?
What are the companies who have IE6-only applications going to do? They'll have to upgrade or consciously continue to use an obsolete browser. Did they sign contracts with businesses that state they'll support IE6 forever or something?
Microsoft employees may hate supporting IE6, but someone in charge there doesn't mind it so much.
So why doesn't Microsoft just announce that they will no longer be supporting IE6?
They have, it's the same as XP's (8 April 2014). You answer your own question: products as widespread as IE6 cannot just be withdrawn overnight. It's quite a sensible move have the end-of-life the same as XP, when the corporate desktop moves from XP there IE6 will effectively be dead. Microsoft would like this to happen earlier I understand: it has to cost them money to maintain so much code.
Outlook Web Access requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher to allow you to use the full version.
That is more up Microsoft's alley. The article is a better example of doing good through some bad, a moral quandary.
Microsoft's schtick is to sit there and tell you with a straight face that browsers like Chrome, Firefox & Opera (and all Mac browsers) can't possibly display a calendar in a month view. This is a feature unique to the rendering powerhouse that is IE6 or higher.
It just doesn't seem like the same thing to me. One seems to further the progress of the web through less than reputable means, the other is intentional crippling for no gain whatsoever other than locking out your competitors.
Article 1: "Microsoft today announced the release of a suite of web-based applications designed to compete with Google's popular apps, including Gmail and GoogleDocs. We're not sure yet what will motivate Google users to migrate, though."
Article 2: "It looks like Microsoft is going to release an update which will cause all IE users to be prompted to use Microsoft's new suite of web-based applications instead of Google's..."
I loathe IE 6 as much as the next person, and I appreciate the cleverness that went into Google's solution to this, but it would be dishonest of me not to call it sneaky, shrewd, and anti-competitive.
Actually they will be helping Microsoft run their Office Online App on IE6 which is not on the list of supported browsers but Safari is, which is webkit based. So they may end up giving an incentive for IE6 users not to upgrade but just install this plugin.
I have an unsubstantiated theory: gmail's rich features, chat, cal etc -- that didn't originally work on IE -- got a lot more people to switch to FireFox than security concerns.
