there is a fairly interesting dynamic to large companies supporting open source projects. First of all, it's not a trivial issue for a company the size of IBM to officially support a technology/product/project, a fact that is sometimes not apparent to most startups. The process is somewhat akin to giving yourself a virus that there is no known antibody for; anything supported by IT is done with the presumption that the organization will be living with it for quite a long time. So picking up a new product for companywide rollout involves not just the physical process of rolling it out, but all of the education and support issues after the fact and finally a degree of integration with all of your other IT assets like security (single sign on still doesn't work with Firefox on SAP's network). There is a commitment of man hours for new release testing and rollout, and so on... so basically a simple thing like supporting a new browser becomes complicated rather quickly.
The interesting dynamic that I referenced in the beginning of my comments is that these large companies are adopting many open source projects without any expectation of support from a providing vendor. They are going it alone. Obviously in the case of Linux itself there are large vendors providing services, and many large projects like Apache and Sendmail have strong support organization, but the vast majority of open source projects don't so when a large enterprise IT organization officially supports them it is their intention to be the first and last line of support, and this should strike fear into the hearts of every enterprise software company out there for if enterprise customers get used to the idea of supporting their own software infrastructure soup-to-nuts then the dominant stream of revenue for software companies could end up drying up... but would that be a bad thing???
Link: IBM moves in Firefox's direction.
Will IBM's move help Firefox gain some traction in the enterprise? In and of itself, probably not. Many corporate intranets use Active X and other IE-specific hooks, and supporting Firefox (or any other non-IE browser for that matter) might involve a fair amount of rework. On the other hand, Firefox would likely be less expensive to support as the amount of "in the wild" browser-specific exploits for it pales in comparison to IE.
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