You put it in the configuration and expect the IT department to have it correctly configured for their site. When people try to access it from outside computers

You put it in the configuration and expect the IT department to have it correctly configured for their site. When people try to access it from outside computers and it breaks you tell them how to put it in compatability mode. Ideal? Hardly, but standards compliance makes future versions of the browser so much easier and IE doesn't want to be the legacy intranet browser and keep losing ground to firefox on the mainstream internet. Most likely these intranets keep IE7 on their computers and slowly migrate and phase out. It's not like these sorts of things are alien to the entreprise world - they spend an enormous amount of time dealing with legacy incompabilities - but consumers don't want legacy browsers and that's what Microsoft are afraid of.