Posted on 09/21/2007 6:54:03 AM PDT by NYer
The week's not off to a great start for Microsoft. On Monday, a European court upheld almost $1 billion in antitrust penalties against the software maker. A day later, it's IBM that is taking aim at Microsoft with the release of a free office software suite called Lotus Symphony.
IBM said Tuesday that Symphony, based on open source software from the OpenOffice.org project, will be made available as a free download essentially to whoever wants it. The package contains a word processor called Lotus Symphony Documents, as well as Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. IBM is calling the suite "enterprise-grade productivity software" and points out that it's based on many of the same tools found in its pricey Lotus Notes 8 e-mail and collaboration platform.
Because it's free, Lotus Symphony could present a significant challenge to Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite in the market for office productivity software. Some commercial software buyers have expressed concerns about Office 2007's price and compatibility with older applications. The software is based on a new format developed by Microsoft called Office Open XML. Earlier this month, the format failed to gain fast track approval from the International Organization for Standardization.
As an Open Office derivative, Lotus Symphony employs the Open Document Format to ensure cross-application portability of data. ODF is an approved ISO format, a fact that appeals to many enterprise software buyers -- particularly those in the government market. "With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information," said IBM software chief Steve Mills, in a statement.
Earlier this month, IBM said it would donate portions of the Lotus Notes code to OpenOffice.org, which governs the Open Office project.
To date, Open Office has failed to put much of a dint in Microsoft's multi-billion dollar office software business. However, that could start to change in light of Monday's announcement. IBM said it has tasked 35 programmers with creating enhancements for Symphony. Because it's an open source project, those enhancements will be made available to other vendors that offer versions of Open Office, including Sun Microsystems.
IBM's Symphony announcement takes a page from the company's Linux playbook. Big Blue is a significant backer of the open source operating system, though it derives no direct revenue from the software. Rather, IBM has created an ecosystem of customers and partners that buy IBM's commercial middleware products to tie together systems built on Linux. The strategy not only boosts demand for IBM middleware, it also denies to Microsoft some valuable market share. IBM now appears to be adopting a similar strategy in the desktop market.
OpenOffice isn't the only challenge to Microsoft's dominance in the productivity software market. Google recently entered the fray with an array of hosted applications sold as a service under the Google Apps brand. Earlier this month, outsourcer Capgemini said it would add support for Google Apps Premier to its service offerings.
Sounds like the answer is "yes".
And the company is "Microshaft"...
If you turn off the Java virtual machine in Open Office, you lose a few features (macros, I think), but the software speeds up quite nicely.
You do know that OO2.3 is out? I was informed via an icon in swriter earlier in the week. Security fixes, among other things.
At work I have to use Lotus Notes. It sucks. IBM will have to give away anything Lotus for me to use it ‘cause there is no way I would ever buy it.
I wonder if the interface is derived from the old Lotus Smart Suite products or from Open Office. I disliked the Smart Suite UI (though Office’s doesn’t really seem like it’s quite done either).
I generally never send Office docs in native format anyway. I print to PDF, and send that. It’s a static snapshot, so they can’t alter the document and have it still look like it came from me, it’s smaller, and it’s not dependant on the recipient to have any particular piece of software (even Office).
Now that’s not good for collaborative efforts where you want them to be able to modify the document, but in those cases, Open Office can save in Office formats anyway.
Yeah this is another one of those free foreign clones of US industry standards. This one started somewhere in Europe and according to reports the IBM version is being developed in China.
“I used a product called Lotus Symphony for DOS...”
As you know, Lotus Symphony was an integrated product that had word processing, spreadsheet etc in its package and the spreadsheet was similar to Lotus 1,2,3. It was a great program, and it was 1983 or so when I started using it. It even ran from 5 1/4” floppy’s. I used it first on an early IBM PC that had two 5 1/4” drives, but no harddrive.
I will take a look at this new Lotus Symphony.
“What makes you say that?”
Slow. No security integration so I have to type my passwords all the time. Messaging is not enabled yet the stupid thing won’t stop asking me for a password. Lousy features that are incomplete. No continuous mode that will alert me to incoming mail. I could go on forever.
AFAIR, OOo 2 will still run on '98, though it better be a pretty healthy box.. say 800 mhz or better w/ as much ram as possible...
Now if they offer Websphere for free...
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