Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

IBM breaks open the Office lock on customers, offers a path to and open standard with new, no charge Lotus Symphony

Lots of news since I left for Europe. The trip was amazing (photos and maybe videos coming soon). But since I left, OOXML failed in ISO, the EU rejected Microsoft’s appeal, SCO filed for Chapter 11, and IBM joined OpenOffice.org as a significant contributor (35 developers).

Today, though, IBM also announced Lotus Symphony – a no charge set of office productivity editors (you may be familiar with Microsoft Office’s Excel, Powerpoint, and Word – they’re very similar). IBM’s Symphony suite, like OpenOffice allows users to also start transitioning to OpenDocument Format (ODF). The new suite is NO CHARGE (yes, the nice way of saying “free” without implying “cheap” or “dumbed down”). These are the real deal, the same editors that come bundled with Lotus Notes 8 and the work on Linux or Windows (although I prefer Linux). The URL to download them is here:

www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony

The interesting thing now is that Microsoft Office costs what… $X00 and you can get the IBM Symphony suite for $0. Symphony handles Word, ODF, and many other formats (including PDF output)… Microsoft Office… well… not so much. Symphony is even cheaper than StarOffice (unless you go through GooglePack)

Take Symphony for a test run – there’s no charge – and keep an eye out because I can absolutely feel OpenOffice and by proxy Symphony are going to see great advances in their evolution going forward.

A nice quote from Steve Mills with a relation back to Linux:

“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. “The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways.”