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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...

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader's invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM. The expansion, scheduled to be unveiled Thursday, threatens to bog down Microsoft Corp.'s efforts to persuade businesses to buy the latest version of its market-leading Office suite that was developed along with its new Vista operating system. Google's software bundle, to be sold for a $50 annual fee per user, also poses a challenge to International Business Machines Corp. and its...

It seems the choices for Mac OSX Tiger users in the way of office suites are few between. There's AppleWorks 6, Open Office 2.0 that runs on X11 but can be a hassle to set up for all but techies, NeoOffice that's behind OOO.org latest but runs natively in OSX. And of course there's Microsoft's 2004 Office suite in two flavors. Since this is a vanity and given the options, what do Freepers running OSX use for every day productivity work? Recommendations are welcome.

Industry experts who have taken a look at the OpenOffice.org 2.0 said new database functionality included with the open source personal productivity suite will go a long way toward making the system a viable alternative to Microsoft Office -- especially in the all important small and medium-sized business (SMB) market. OpenOffice 2.0, which is still in the beta testing phase, includes a new database creation application called Base that is similar to Microsoft Access and rounds out an offering that already includes alternatives to Microsoft's Excel, PowerPoint and Paint applications. Base allows users to create standalone databases and related data...

IBM dismisses OpenOffice as child's play By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Posted: Ashlee Vance at 02:26 GMT IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software, but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to one of free software's most needed products. Karen Smith, vice president of Linux strategy and market development at IBM, has been telling a number of publications that no open source equivalent of Microsoft Office exists. Lest you think Smith has been living in a cave, rest easy. She does appear to be acquainted with OpenOffice...