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

[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.

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.

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

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

Yea, I would much rather become IBMs bitch than MS bitch... or not. Just ignore IBMs absurd pricing, neglect of Lotus Notes (where is the Linux client???), massive lay-offs replacing workers with H1-Bs and offshoring, etc... Yea, bunch of fucking saints over at IBM, until you have to do business with them.

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

[betterunixthanunix]

"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."

People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not. But I can think of a few things that OOo has that MS Office does not. People who have trouble with OOo seem to be people who were originally trained with MS Office, and so it should come as no surprise that they are having trouble. Yes, things are in different places. Yes, things have different names.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Idaho]

Open a spreadsheet in Excel and label 6 cells from A1-A6. Now select row 5 right click and select cut. Select row 1 and right click and select "Insert Cut Cells." You still have 5 labelled cells, the order they're in is simply different. Now trying doing this very basic activity in Calc and see if you get the same results. Nope, you don't.

Goodness my...instead you have to select 'Insert', press enter to select the default option to move the other cells down 9i.e. insert a row), and paste the cell you just cut. Involves 1 extra mouse click/key-press, in exchange for a simpler right-click menu.

Yes, I would certainly call that a showstopper bug, uhhhuhhh.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

Well the beauty of bitching publicly is that someone gets to show you a solution. Thanks, I'll resume testing OOo now :)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[NoOneInParticular]

Okay, cut, insert, and paste does the trick. Excel has a menu item for this doing the insert and the paste in one go. What's the big deal? If you really want to, you can add it as a macro.

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: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.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Odin_Tiger]

Better articles w/ links:
News.com
The Guardian (Blog)
CNN Money
ZDNET

And also, actual Lotus Symphony page on IBM's site, with download link.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Master of Transhuman]

"This is non news except that it's IBMs name and not some single dev schmuck in the middle of the Ukraine, modding OO."

Uhm, that happens to be what makes it news. As an article mentions, Lotus Notes is used by millions of people who might be further interested in this - which means OO (and ODF) might - I say, might - get a big boost.

More importantly, since this appears to be based on a 1.x OO fork, how does it compare with OO 2.x? That's what I'd like to know (without going to the trouble of downloading, installing and testing it myself since I don't have the time right now and besides which, I'm lazy.)

If it's not as good as OO 2.x, why bother (other than the Lotus Notes integration, which is mostly a boon for IBM and Notes users)? In the latter case, it's like Thunderbird and the Eudora client - it's mostly just useful for former Eudora users. An OO useful for Lotus Notes users is fine, but it's not going to really change the track for OO 2.x if it's not compatible enough except for document opening.

Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[scottsk]

Okay ... so what is this? The "news" article had no details at all. Have they open-sourced SmartSuite? If you throw out the stupid third paragraph which has no meaningful information, and cull the meaningful information from the first two paragraphs, the story says "document, spreadsheet and presentation software in a group of tools" which doesn't tell you what these are - are they re-branding OpenOffice like StarOffice does? And it will be "called Lotus Symphony" -- is this a Lotus product? Are they open sourcing SmartSuite with Lotus 1-2-3 like I've been dreaming for years? Is this brand-new software technology IBM has developed? I want to know more!

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[beaverbrother]

It looks like it is actually available for download here

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Not premature, but undue hype all the same. You would think that after ISO lost most of its credibility in this field following the recent OOXML mess, people wouldn't assign much value to any document format just because it's been ISO certified.

NYT piece on IBM's move

[MLCT]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/technology/18blue.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

Coverage of the announcement plus some comments on the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF. As for the announcement - the 35 FT developers on OOO can't be a bad thing - OOO has the potential to become a large force for good, but it has always been a couple of steps away from where it could, and should, be - hopefully this might help rectify that.

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?

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[mister_woods]

"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."

There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them.

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)

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).

already released

[Anonymous Coward]

see http://symphony.lotus.com/

(less or more) rebranded lotus productivity tools -> ooo1.3 bloated into eclipse with some eyecandy.

the Notes 8 client without the Notes part

[dominux]

Notes 8 is a major architectural change for the Notes client, it is now presented through an Eclipse framework where it can live alongside other applications in the same Eclipse instance. The Notes 8 client has a bunch of "productivity editors" wordprocessor, presentation tool, spreadsheet, and these live in the same Eclipse instance as the regular Notes client bit. Symphony is the exact same code without the Notes client part. At the moment it is based on a fork of OpenOffice.org 1.x from before the SISL license change, however in the next release (or thereabouts) it will be based on a new LGPL cut of OpenOffice.org. This is really cool, it isn't quite competing with OpenOffice.org, improvements and contributions will flow in both directions. It is competing with Microsoft Office and the branding, packaging, support etc from IBM might go down quite well in some companies. I am not quite sure what the business model is for IBM, I guess they will do OK on the support and consultancy and it is a bit of a loss leader for the Notes client. Plus there is the bonus of screwing over Microsoft which has got to be worth a lot.

Whoope!

[WhiteWolf666]

The install base of the ODF format plus the user interface of Lotus Notes!

I can smell success!

(just a joke, I'm actually a fan of both :) )

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.