The IT department's job is to enable the company's users to do their job effectively, efficiently, and securely. If that job involves visiting non-company-controlled websites, then they'll be well-served by having a modern browser.
The comment described in the post here is definitely overly insulting, but in general, making the users feel pain is one way to give the people in charge incentive to change.
(Edit: I agree that the insults are pointless, so I don't think we're really arguing about anything substantiative. That said, I'm sure this designer guy couldn't give a crap whether it's pointless or not.)
Yeah, IT has a job of optimizing the company's use of resources. I still question the idea that IE6 or IE7 are good for security, but (given more enterprise software) IE6 is generally a business requirement. Truthfully, if your company is still on IE6, then IT should have a whitelist of the sites you can visit (not a blacklist of the sites you cannot).
-- yeah, I don't think we are really disagreeing on anything substantiative
One might think that simply not having content/functionality for IE6 users would be enough incentive. As another poster said, insulting the user isn't likely to prompt a change in software.
Often times, IE6 users don't know that they are missing anything because they are on IE6 and have nothing to compare to. A message of "this feature is not supported on your browser" or, preferably, "this feature requires a modern browser with support for HTML X and CSS Y" would go a long way to communicating that, in a factual, non-confrontational way. I think the latter message is better because it gives those who would use the website a factual rationale to take to their IT departments as to why an upgrade would be good, rather than letting the IT department dismiss the website creators as IE6-hating.
The comment described in the post here is definitely overly insulting, but in general, making the users feel pain is one way to give the people in charge incentive to change.
(Edit: I agree that the insults are pointless, so I don't think we're really arguing about anything substantiative. That said, I'm sure this designer guy couldn't give a crap whether it's pointless or not.)