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."

Comments

Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses. its joining the open office movement have made the movement pass the critical mass. now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[SCHecklerX]

And since IBM isn't really in the PC operating system business any more, they aren't abusing a monopoly position to do this. This is a beautiful move by IBM.

There's still a long way to go to bring back open standards and real competition, but whittling away at the office suite is a good start.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Gr8Apes]

My suspicion is that firms like the flexibility that the MS solution provides. Computers will work well enough with almost no support(I have seen no MS shop staff support at adequate numbers to keep the machines running), and the support personal are usually semi-skilled so if they complain about over work, they are easily replaced. And those are the reasons why most MS shops are riddled with spyware, adware, viruses, etc.

Lots of people think they're capable of supporting MS software just like lots of lemmings believe they can walk on air....

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.

I'm not sure how you can support that claim. Pretty much all businesses today are heavily reliant on Windows and Office. I suspect a rather small proportion of all businesses use IBM kit, and I suspect that nearly all of those that do are medium-sized or large businesses, not the small businesses that drive economies.

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

Sure they are. Also, this is the year of Linux on the desktop and Firefox will have a majority share of the browser market by 2008.

The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office. If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine. But it lacks the power, usability and feature completeness of MS Office. Pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking by OSS fans, as is pretending businesses are going to change their office suite just to avoid spending a few dollars per employee on a more productive tool.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

at least ibm doesnt try to wrest control of MY pc at my OWN home/office out of my hands. thats what i care about.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Just Some Guy]

Office Professional = $20
SQL Server 2005 = $240
Small Business Server 2003 = $68

OpenOffice Extreme Ultimate Edition: Free.
PostgreSQL: Free.
Every popular network daemon ever written plus the platform it was probably written on: Free.
Realizing that you're running a smaller version of the platform that powers Google and you didn't pay a dime for it: priceless.

For playing video games, there's Windows. For everything else, there's Unix.