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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."
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.
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!