Japanese businesses and government agencies are panicking as Microsoft retires Internet Explorer; March 2022 survey shows 49% of organizations use IE for work
Nikkei Asia :
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft spent six years telegraphing this exit: it cut off support for IE 8, 9 and 10 back in 2016, began forcing certain URLs to open in Edge instead of IE in late 2020, and gave a full year's notice when it set the June 15, 2022 retirement date. Yet a March 2022 survey still found 49% of Japanese organizations using IE for work — meaning half the country's businesses and government agencies hit the cutoff with migrations unfinished.
First-order effects
- Japanese companies and government agencies running internal portals, procurement systems, or line-of-business apps built for IE must now move them to Edge — whose IE compatibility mode is the only bridge Microsoft left — or accept broken workflows.
- Any organization still on IE loses security updates entirely, turning every remaining deployment into an unpatched attack surface inside corporate networks.
Second-order effects
- Japanese system integrators and IT services firms inherit a wave of paid legacy-rewrite work, since apps that depended on IE-only ActiveX controls cannot simply be pointed at Edge.
- The exposure lands on top of an already weak position: S&P and IBM later found Japan was the world's most-targeted country for cyberattacks in 2024, with legacy IT systems cited as the reason.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, browser retirement stops being a consumer inconvenience and becomes a national-infrastructure event — governments dependent on vendor-controlled software face forced modernization cycles dictated by foreign companies' product calendars.
- The gap between Microsoft's six-year warning and Japan's 49% adoption at the deadline suggests organizational inertia, not vendor communication, is the binding constraint on legacy IT reform.
The trend: Enterprise and government dependence on deprecated legacy software now outlasts vendor lifecycles by years, making browser and platform retirements de facto deadlines for national IT modernization.