IBM Launches Free Productivity Suite

By Greg McNevin

June 9, 2008: While it’s market share is slowly eroded by open open source alternatives such as OpenOffice and StarOffice, Microsoft Office is now face with another challenger in the form of IBM’s Lotus Symphony.

Building upon its highly successful Lotus Notes, IBM has now launched a suite of OpenDocument Format (ODF)-based word, spreadsheet and presentation productivity tools.

In beta since last September and coupled with Lotus Notes 8.01, Lotus Symphony is a free stand-alone suite that has attracted upwards of 260 million downloads since September 2007.

As it is based on ODF, Symphony is compatible with the same formats as OpenOffice, however, it is also fully compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, and Office 2007 support is currently in the pipeline.

IBM says the move into productivity software does not mean it is going back into software like it did with OS/2 in the 90’s, but rather it is moving into the support space, similar to other companies such as Red Hat and Novell which base their business on support of open source software.

The move still puts it into an increasingly competitive market, with Google, Sun and many more competing for a piece of the lucrative, but Microsoft-dominated productivity market.

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