Ars technica had an interesting article on woes of the ip4 to ip6 transition. The short story is that the transition is going to be rocky at best. There will be, no doubt, a lot of finger pointing when things go bad, and there is clearly a large disconnect between the IETF, the network gear manufacturers and the network operators, and the poor sysadmins on the ground. One thing I did not realise is that ip6 at the time took ideas and notions from IPX, which after 10 years of ip4 monoculture, and simply not understood. The interesting thing is that there is another transition going on on the web at the moment, from HTML 4 to 5. The former transition is quite abrupt, with a clear break to a more elegant solution. The later is more a muddy transition that adds a lot of isolated features. Depending on your vision of computer science, you might prefer one or the other, only time will tell us how those two transition pan out. Just for fun I mapped my transition algorithm.