Maybe among IT people they were but, IT isn't everything. If you had shown 1kX to a physicist, he would've automatically assumed that you were talking about 10^3 times X no matter what X was. I actually live (and grew up) in an SI country and the system works beautifully. Sure, people say kilo to refer to 1kg, but this practice gets a huge amount of criticism from teachers over here, who keep insisting that kilo=1000.