Microsoft is usually pretty shrewd in the ways and means of business, so this move is a bit surprising:

The Mozilla Foundation is expecting to see a surge in interest in the Firefox browser from enterprise users once Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 7 next year.

IE 7, which will be available in beta this summer, will not be available to users of Windows 2000.

Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7.

"We have high hopes that we'll do better and better in (the enterprise) space with Windows 2000 users," Dotzler said. "We're excited about Microsoft launching IE 7--it will remind a lot of people that if they want better features they have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading" to Windows XP.

Nearly half of all Windows-based business desktops are still using Windows 2000, according to a recent survey by AssetMetrix, meaning that there is a big market for the Mozilla Foundation to tap into. (emphasis added)

Firefox is already making serious inroads into Microsoft's long dominance, coming from nowhere to seize a market share somewhere between seven and nine percent. IE 7 was expected to stop the bleeding by incorporating many of the Firefox innovations that were missing in Microsoft's former version. However, if the new Internet Explorer is not available on any windows platform aside from XP, I do believe that Firefox will continue to flourish, even in the business world.

Case in point: In May 2005, IBM encouraged its employees to use Firefox, serving it up on their own internal servers and providing helpdesk support for the product.

And what would this post merit if I neglected to include the obligatory tidbits of useless trivia: The original name for the project was Phoenix (I'm sure some obscure reference to the ashes of Netscape), which was changed to Firebird due to a trademark dispute, and then almost immediately to Firefox due to a second trademark dispute.

Disclaimer: This post was written using Firefox.