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

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future. Which is a shame because the latest version of Open Office Calc is inferior to Excel 2003 (as I said here). I hope that IBM's support for OOo can make it a better program so that it quickly surpasses the old "de facto office suite" in functionality and use.

In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[aim2future]

My serious and optimistic view: Soon we will see computing interoperability and software development flourish and we will look back upon the MS dominant time where they were holding free software innovation and interoperability back as an annoying historic paranthesis.

The next important step in the world of computing now is to Stop software patents! To achieve the similar stimulance to software development as when the movie industry moved to California to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.

Support FFII and EFF

I guess noone is seriously interested in OOXML any more, but I collected some arguments about our company's opinions about OOXML recently.

If you are interested in reading people's blogs, here is mine about SCO finally dead! MS next?

notes

[g4b]

Does that mean they will migrate Lotus Notes into OpenOffice to beat Outlook?

Just imagine that.

The OOo logo will be expanded with a big fat third bird on the right bottom, all painted in blue and orange.

(No, I have nothing against IBM, OOo or Notes, but I have to use Notes on a daily basis)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

Let me put it this way,

in the past, ibm was for big business. ms was medium and small businesses' friend.

with this move, ibm, who is still the friend of the big businesses is pushing forward something that is more flexible and cheap - open office. it is free and it is going to get so much flexibility with modules, 3rd party apps and so that its going to be a blast of flexibility.

many big businesses happily using something that is free and they can control means that any small to medium businesses doing business with them will feel compelled, even felt necessary to use the same suite in regard to ease and compatibility.

then, so long microsoft, in regard to office suite.

hmm.

[apodyopsis]

Just goes to show that even if MS get OOXML adopted as a standard by ISO by their various mechanisms and shenanigans - it would all come to nothing if there is a "de facto" standard already. And ODF is looking to be positioned to be just that.

It's not always the standards that people recognize and certify that win the day.

I look forward to the day when MS are forced to implement ODF filters for Office just to stay in the game. They once said that they would not support ODF - like any business they might have no choice if their sales are on the line. Once ODF is the standard then Office is going to have some real problems in the face of free alternatives that support the same format - MS biggest fear will be realized.

MS main weapons is proprietary formats and proprietary software and OOXML/Office is one of the biggest examples. (Yes I know OOXML is not "technically" proprietary anymore).

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

It looks like the limit for Calc is indeed 32K, unless the documentation is obsolete.

I would have liked to use Calc for some of my blogwork (which entails spreadsheets of 70K+ records), but went with Office XP instead.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[CAIMLAS]

I'll back it up - and I not only hate MS Office and MS's behavior, but I have a philosophical fondness for open source. I have quite a few 'operational problems' and frustrations when I attempt to use the later versions of MSO; I cut my teeth on word processing with WP511, and then later with MSO 95/97. But it's still "better" (and I have similar 'problems' with OOo, too).

In my mind there are two, maybe three things which make MS Office simply "better" than OOo. And they're not simply features which MSO has that OOo doesn't. These differences are:

1) Simple document scrolling. If I have a 30 page document with images in it (or even without images, as is often the case) on a system with a 2Ghz processor and 512Mb+ RAM, hitting the 'page down' key should not result in a lengthy delay. Neither should I see "typing lag", even if I'm editing in the middle of a large document. OOo does all this (and more, including outright momentary and permanent freezes while editing), and I've only experienced brief freezes/lag while opening large MSO documents.
2) Stability and file support. I've lost close to 20 pages of (single spaced, fictional/creative) writing to OOo 2.x's ODF now, whether it's due to the program crashing while I'm working before a save, or the document getting corrupted on save/crash (likewise for the backup, in two instances). This is why I'll use the older 1.x OOo strain over 2.x if I'm going to use OOo.
3) It's slow. This pertains to the first two, but it does NOT feel like finessed code in the least bit! (largely a criticism of 2.x, again).

If IBM can help 'fix' the first two problems, they'll be well on their way to an 'enterprise' application - and they'll likely fix #3 simply in the process.