Wow, I'm all for EOL'ing old versions of IE, but I'm surprised at the complete lack of notice (on a corporate scale). Was this known to be in the works for a while?
My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in getting people to upgrade (as well as resulting in fewer compromised browsers).
Corporate scale business does not want to depend on "seeing things coming". When you have millions upon millions invested you want to get explicit deadlines for when support for products you depend upon will be dropped. It is very expensive to either do unnecessary rewrites or getting started too late on necessary rewrites.
My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in getting people to upgrade (as well as resulting in fewer compromised browsers).