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IBM Backs Firefox In-House
An anonymous reader wrote in with the link to a CNet story describing IBM's adoption of the Firefox browser for internal use. From the article: "Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting this past Friday, IBM workers could download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff. IBM's commitment to Firefox is among its most prominent votes of confidence from a large corporation."
...since IBM has tradition been a huge advocate of open source.
This may be the best possible reference case for the average IT guy trying to convince his/her boss that FireFox is a good solution for a corporate environment.
Having IBM as a good example to use when pushing for corporate adoption of Firefox is a great thing for people working in this area. Although, it must be said that IBM are less likely to have troublesome components (IE specific webpages, ActiveX components) within any intranet pages than other companies due to their own products in that area (I'm thinking Lotus..).
Business Voyeur
I know the whole "officially supported" practice, but really, it's a damned web browser. Certainly the biggest software services company can find a few people that know how that works...
No matter what one thinks of IBM and its products, they are creating the blueprints companies around the world are using to get themselves out from mess they've all put themselves into with costly Microsoft products.
The headline isn't IBM back Firebox, but IBM shows the commercial world the way out of the quagmire of Microsoft dependance.
With IBMs large scale support for OSS , and its moves to replace the windows desktops with linux not to mention its sale of the PC business , Its only natural that they would move people on to an open browser.
.Acceptance in the corperate market would mean a great deal of people will be using firefox at work , which would perhaps have the knock on effect of them using it at home .
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What will be intresting to see is if this has a knock on effect to other large corperation as IBM is still very very influential.
This more than anything could be the break firefox needs toward wide scale acceptance beyond the 10%
When firefox has more than 30% of the market perhaps then we could relax in the knowlidge that most sites would then see fit to not specialise their code for IE
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
How.
1. Buy using Firefox IBM will require all web based apps the company develops or uses to be browser neutral. These means that Microsoft's IE only solutions are not an option.
2. Firefox runs on Linux and Mac as well as Windows. Since all web based apps can now run on Firefox they can also run on Linux and Mac.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Support is usually the reason cited. "We support this product, don't use any other ones because our help desk isn't trained on it."
When the proxy team at the bank I used to work for wanted to use Linux boxes instead of Solaris (self-supporting team) for 2x the speed and 1/3 the cost, we were told no. The decision maker was very pro-MS, had quite a lot of MSFT stock, and had recently been pitched by MS about anti-Linux. But we weren't allowed to use it for technical reasons. Really.
Hopefully, this might lead to IBM helping with developing good tools for remote management of Firefox. It would be very helpful for all the people having big deployments. If Firefox is to be ubiquitous, this is needed.
Hey, 10 years ago, when Win 3.11 and Win95 were the competition, being able to "rub your belly and pat your head at the sam time" was a big plus for OS/2.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
That's because fixes aren't sensational enough. Every news site jumps at the chance to say "Firefox security hole!!!!" or "Apple widgets insecure!!!!" but they seem to forget to post about the fix which is usually pretty soon after the flaw is found.
"Buy using Firefox IBM will require all web based apps the company develops or uses to be browser neutral."
Which, of course, they could have done at any time just by telling their people to do it. Perhaps their apps are already browser neutral.
"Since all web based apps can now run on Firefox they can also run on Linux and Mac."
But what about those poor Linux and Mac users outside of IBM who apparently can't view all those web apps that weren't designed for FireFox? Perhaps someday they'll be able to join their IE brothers and sisters and enjoy the full Internet experience.
MSFT being in the DOW 30, and the bankers being old establishment-types might be a large part of the reason. The recent potential exploits in the news that made Firefox look 2% as bad as IE was enough justification to ban the 'commie' software.
Power to the Peaceful
It's not flamebait, it's a legitimate question.
How will IBM effect Firefox? - How will IBM implement their Firefox rollout?
How will IBM affect Firefox? - How will Firefox be changed because of the relationship?
Firefox will really start to hit the enteprise when you can manage it through Group Policies and deploying it though AD.
Thats what's holding me back on pushing it out to our Windows desktops