> Along these lines, it's interesting to note an eWeek article that 
> indicates many companies are willing to put up with the massive and 
> increasing Internet Explorer security holes in order to maintain the 
> custom applications they've written for the Intranet that only 
> function in IE:
> 

well now, I think it's a little more complicated than that, how many companies
standardised on IE because they didn't have any particular technical knowledge
and decided just to "go with MS"?
or another situation:
Currently where I work IE is required for intranet solutions, these solutions
are maintained by a third party, which third party is hired as IT support,
providing a standard platform, they have this Intranet solution that they
provide and they say IE is required, for "Security reasons". There are other
security reason decisions that I'm not going discuss because if I did my head
would start rotating and I would vomit hellfire but mandating IE for security
reasons is a good indicator of the situation. 

Anyway the problem seems to me not to be changing the intranet, but that the
decision making on such matters is outsourced to a third party which decides not
to change browsers because to do so affects their bottom line.