EU MozCamp 2009/DrumBeat/Group3/

This content was created as part of a brainstorming session at MozCamp Eu 2009

Title

Kiss IE6 Goodbye: End the Pain

or

• "Kiss IE6 Goodbye"
• IE6 R.I.P. August 27, 2001 to August 27, 2010
• IE6 “Obituary Notice”

1 Sentence Summary

Get major websites and developers to sign up to a "no guarantee of support for IE6 after <date>", and use this as leverage in the “Upgrade the Web” process.

Goals

• Reduce number of IE installations to an ignorable percentage
• Give web developers great joy
• Reduce costs at web companies
• Enable users to enjoy the full benefits of the web
  • (Include a couple sexy examples or pain points here? How will the web be more awesome once IE6 is extinct?)
• Make it easy for evangelists to pressure & help IT departments

Audience

• End users still using IE6
• Businesses with websites, particularly large web properties
• IT departments managing IE6 deployments
• Web developers, bloggers, and anyone who runs a web site
• Evangelists to pressure & help IT departments

Potential Partners

• Prominent / popular sites who agree to sign up to stop supporting IE6
• Tech bloggers & Internet taste makers?
  • The big tech blogs, trade publications, and web sites (Slashdot, TechCrunch, boing boing? etc.) so that we can create buzz and awareness around IE6’s “death day?”

Activities

• Wage a robust online campaign (Bongo), beginning with a simple one-page website:

IE6 makes web developers miserable and keeps users from experiencing the full power of the web. After

28th August 2010

the following websites will no longer guarantee to support IE 6:

YouTube [logo] Facebook [logo] 37Signals [logo] Wikipedia Digg Slashdot Orkut .... <list of hundreds of companies>

Could also include a simple countdown clock or widget counting down to IE6’s demise

• "Behind the scenes" lobbying to get this list of major sites on board
  • Get the big online properties on board to use as a hammer and a magnet

• Combined with a robust online campaign to get hundreds of thousands other smaller sites on board
  • Engage large numbers of people to step up and say, "I'm a part of this!"

• Target web properties that are "mission critical" to many businesses as added push to switch
  • e.g., getting Salesforce.com (or financial news feeds, or accounting applications) on board may be more impactful than Facebook -- because business IT managers have a more direct incentive to insure these business-critical sites are supported

• Include support for small events (Conga), with slides and talking points that make it easy for local developers to raise awareness and spread the word in their own communities

Metrics

• Reduce number of IE6 installations
  • Current: <metric>
  • Target: <metric>
• Reduce costs at web companies
  • (Can we give a quick example? Or suggest a <metric>?)
• Others?