Re:What about the other half? (Score 1)

I've talked to the CEO and even he has admitted to having a preference for firefox over IE for example, even though the CIO hasn't officially or formally approved it.

Our company is quite a bit smaller, but we approve of things like Firefox. We even endorse and train users on the additional features.

However, we do lock down the machines so users can't install software. As others have said, users run wild and start trusting every application they see, or they have laptops and let their children use the machines and install bittorrent clients and whatnot and before we know it there are vast amounts of problems.

Our policy is that we must test all software in a test environment before okaying it to be installed. The software must be productivity based and not contain spyware or cause issues with our other applications. Additionally, the software has to be deemed better and/or cheaper than any alternatives we are currently using. Things we have approved so far include OpenOffice, Firefox, and OpenProj.