Slashdot Mirror
IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite
BBCWatcher writes "Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project. IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely."
That's interesting news and all, but I wish they would throw those 35 developers at making Notes not suck first. You know your company's email standard is a piece of shit when you miss the "good old days" of Outlook.
Microsoft is not going to support ODF directly. They are paying other people to write ODF converters. This way, they save face. Microsoft wins.
Also, when the other filters imperfectly translate to/from OOXML, they can blame the makers of the ODF filters, rather than trying to come up with some lame half-assed excuse for imperfect document translation. And so people upgrade to the new MS-Office ("Now supports international standards!"), and they see that ODF documents "suck."
Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
So a bloated, buggy, convoluted office suite that the developers have trouble giving away has 35 more developers to give it an even more massive memory footprint, slower loading times, and additional menu options. And it's going to be branded after a product that's been precariously balanced to keep the other foot out of the grave for a decade.
This is going to be a brilliant success. I'm sure it will be even better than when Sun bought Stardivision and opened the code and nobody but open-source nerds even noticed. Everything is gonna change now. I bet people will be chomping at the bit to give up the software they've spent years getting comfortable with to grab Lotus Symphony by the horns.