It depends on whether the company is B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Client)
B2C more often than not needs to support those old browsers, if it's B2B, then in many cases, you can dictate what browsers are supported and what browsers are not.
On our B2B software, we only support the latest versions of browsers (so no IE8, 9 or 10), on the B2C software, we have found that IE8 is less than 2%, so we've dropped support for it, but do support IE9.
If we were doing sales via those B2C channels, then depending on the volume going through that site, we would probably support IE8 as 2% extra sales would often overshadow the cost of making things IE8 compliant.
IE8 is the new IE6, but we have it a lot easier since IE6 disappeared, IE8 is not nearly as bad as IE6 was.