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."

Comments

Surprising no one...

[Heliologue]

...since IBM has tradition been a huge advocate of open source.

Re:Surprising no one...

[hbo]

The truth is somewhere between "tradition" and "today's passing greed based fad." IBM believes that the basic technology underlying IT will increasingly become a commodity. They feel that Free/Libre and Open Source Software is a major driver of this trend. They made a huge bet 10 years ago that services layered on top of commodity software would be where the growth would be in IT spending. Because the facts have continued to show they were right about this, they have continued to commit the company to courses of action consistent with this direction in the years since. Support by IBM for F/L OSS is completely consistent with this strategic view. Although this is not the same thing as signing on, for example, to Richard Stallman's ethical code, it isn't a flash in the pan, and it won't go away overnight.

Good reference case

[nokiator]

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.

Re:Good reference case

[supabeast!]

Actually, this isn't a good test case for the average IT guy, because IBM is far from an average corporate environment. IBM is a technical company specializing in high-end server hardware and enterprise network consulting, so it's a safe assumption that the majority of IBMs employees are much more computer literate than the average corporate worker.

A better test case would be an insurance company, human-resources outsourcing firm, or a large bank. In on of those the employees not likely to be very computer literate, but they are computer-dependent and likely to do a lot of work via a browser, interacting with remote systems via a web interface.

Good example?

[Sv-Manowar]

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..).

Get Use To It Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Its only natural

[FidelCatsro]

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.
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% .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 .

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 .

Re:Dependence on rival's product?

[LWATCDR]

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.

Nice remote managament

[Tyrell Hawthorne]

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.

Re:Support?

[davenpsm]

According to IBM's site http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/ they currently have 329,000 employees. With an organization that large you don't simply install a new application and hope for the best!

You are correct, it is just a web browser, but when Jack and Jill in accounting cannot figure out where their 'Favorites' list went to and call the help desk, help desk staff need to know the answers. Granted, that is a simple question to answer, but think of the 100 other things that might be different between Firefox and IE (common message text for browser warning dialogs, etc), with 329K employees, even if only a small fraction of them run into questions it can mean time wasted by both the employee asking the question and the help desk person trying to find the answer. That time adds up quickly.

In any case, I see this as a huge success for Firefox!