Here's what I don't get. (Maybe someone here can help answer this.) My company, with 18,000 employees, recently decided to upgrade workstations from IE6 to IE7. It wasn't entirely seamless - employees still had to double-click a desktop icon to kick off the upgrade. What I don't understand is why they upgraded to IE7. Once you're going through the friction of doing an upgrade at all, why not go all the way? Is the retraining coefficient that much more for IE8 (or 9) vs. IE7?
I can't say what happened at your company, but at mine (which is a bit bigger), the IT people started "qualifying" IE7 when it came out. It took them until after IE8 was released to get all the various internal groups working and tested on IE7. The testing part was really the big piece, so they couldn't just jump to IE8 when it was released because it would have meant months or years redoing the testing cycle.
