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."

Ms, your case is lost

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

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

Better articles w/ links:
News.com [news.com]
The Guardian (Blog) [guardian.co.uk]
CNN Money [cnn.com]
ZDNET [zdnet.com]

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

Re:Ms, your case is lost

"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.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

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

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

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). [slashdot.org] 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It looks like the limit for Calc is indeed 32K [openoffice.org], 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

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.

IBM Who'd a thunk it

As an Apple kind of a guy I used to view IBM as the enemy. No longer. Big Blue has been taking an approach to computing and IT over the past decade or so that is technically astute, and thus over the long haul economically astute.

PS

Branding madness

IBM are supporting OpenOffice.org? Great! Why do they feel the need to brand OpenOffice.org as "Lotus Symphony" though? It may be a good short-term brand (More IBM customers know about Lotus than OpenOffice.org) but long-term there would surely be more benefit from sticking with OpenOffice.org Perhaps IBM hired away the Sun marketing department. I don't know.

Hmm...

Funny. IBM creating a branch of a project that was a fork of a Sun product (which is now a branch of it.)

Even funnier, IBM already had a product to do just this, Lotus SmartSuite. (Then again, seeing as it was last updated... what, in 2000? 1999? Somewhere in there? it wasn't going to succeed. ;) Wonder if Lenovo will end up putting this on every ThinkPad that doesn't ship with MS Office... they DO hand out SmartSuite licenses already...)

notes

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)

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

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?

It looks like it is actually available for download here [lotus.com]

Nobody gets fired for..

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.

Will anybody get fired for buying both?

Lotus Symphony was great

Back when I had a bitchen Color Graphics Adapter (8 colors!) and Quadram Quadboard in my IBM PC...

Does this mean....

....that SmartSuite is dead now?

Admittedly, OpenOffice is now a better product, but it seems a waste to let some pretty good code (WordPro, 1-2-3, etc.) just go the way of OS/2.

Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

IBM has a long history of adopting failed, failing or about-to-fail products. Lotus Notes was a classic example.

Even products with some hope of recovery have been driven to their doom by IBM.

IBM are the kings of big computers and big operating systems - they haven't got a clue about desktop software.

Leave it alone IBM!

NYT piece on IBM's move

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

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

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 [cobbles.com] to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.

Support FFII [ffii.org] and EFF [eff.org]

I guess noone is seriously interested in OOXML any more, but I collected some arguments about our company's opinions about OOXML [neurologic.se] recently.

If you are interested in reading people's blogs, here is mine about SCO finally dead! MS next? [blogs.su.se]

And will it...

So, will this office suite, which is being sent to Lotus users, be backward compatible with what the recipients are currently using?

Will it be based on OpenOffice.org?

Will it run faster than OpenOffice.org?

Will it have a less clunky interface than common office suites?

Just some questions from a curious observer. :-)

Multi-pronged attack

With multiple vendors each supporting the same document format, it becomes a real fight for marketplace dominance. Microsoft Office better than Open Office, well there's Lotus Symphony, Sun Office and KOffice as well. I'm downloading Symphony right now to see if my editor that hates Open Office would find it more appealing. And, by being interchangeable, it does infact become a free-market economy, everyone on the same level playing field.

No 1 suite will do everything for everyone, so these variety of options only helps the overall marketplace.

Notes on Linux

"IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux"

No. IBM is supporting Notes on RHEL and SLED. Attempts to install on other distributions will result in silent failures of the installer, undocumented files all over the place, or if you are really lucky (as I was) it will install, but then inexplicably fail to launch after two weeks of very buggy use.

Improvements

Maybe IBM could kick Sun up their behind and correct a problem with OpenOffice. I recently installed the current version of OO over a previous version, and rather than it installing in the partition I want it, the OO install gave no option where to save the installation. It then preceded to delete the old installation off of the preferred partition, and installed itself in the most stupid of places - the same drive that Windows lives on, making backups that much more difficult.

I hate installations that think the Windows drive / directory is the perfect place to install and give you no choice over it. I'd expect that behaviour from M$ installs.

hmm.

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

see http://symphony.lotus.com/ [lotus.com]

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

Wish they'd revive AmiPro

I still think that was the best word processor I ever used.

How many versions are there?

So, how many different variations of Open Office will there be out there? The IBM one, the Sun one, the various Linux distro versions, NeoOffice, etc. I am sure I have missed a few. I can't help thinking this is all diluting the presence of Open Office.

screenshots

Lotus notes looks so much better than openoffice 2.3
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa [lotus.com] documents
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_pe.jspa [lotus.com] presentations
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_sse.jspa [lotus.com] spreadsheets
hopefully this can help eat into Microsoft's market share in the office world.

Most likely just a political move to back ODF

I would be surprised if any serious, long-term development effort would go into this. Most likely, it's a strawman product to show to the world that ODF is the standard format not only of OpenOffice and StarOffice, but also of "Lotus Symphony", making ODF look better on paper.

Free?

Will it be free, or just "free"? I can't find any information on that.

the Notes 8 client without the Notes part

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.

WordPro Filter

This sounds great. I wonder if they would offer a WordPro import filter. At my company, they use Lotus Smartsuite (which includes WordPro) as the "official" office suite. Some people use Microsoft and a bunch of the IT folks (myself included) use OpenOffice.org. It would be great to get something which was basically OpenOffice.org, had corporate support backing (useful due to a co-worker/boss who thinks all freeware is inferior to payware by default), and could open our old WordPro documents.

Lotus SmartSuit

I thought they would freshen up the Lotus SmartSuit and release it for free. Now that would have been news. A new competitor on the market backed by a million dollar company.

But they will just rename OpenOffice.Org That won't change anything except maybe hurt the OpenOffice brand.

Another harpoon in Microsoft

IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project

This time a steely barb in another one of its profit centers. Microsoft is too fat to kill with a pointed stick but this will sting all the same.

Microsoft also stuck a harpoon in themselves with Vista. Something they've been doing a lot lately. Product activation, byzantine EULA's, where renting software isn't enough you also have to buy a license for your users to connect to it. Nevermind you paid for the server license, and paid for the client OS, you have to buy a freaking license to connect the two. And many act like this all okay somehow. It's freaking nuts.

35 developers helping out with OpenOffice is going to make a big difference. IBM lending credibility to OpenOffice will likely do a lot to enhance its image, regardless of whether they added any support staff.

Why based on OOo?

They should open-source 1-2-3 and AmiPro.

Visibility and discussion itself is good

As others post suggested and contradicted, IBM may or may not be trusted by corporations. Its execution could be very much ham handed or not. The ISO might yet fast track OOXML in Feb08, or not. Despite all that, the high profile discussions about the issue of file format compatibility, interoperability, archival endurance, upgrade treadmill, vendor lock etc itself will have some amount of good effect on the software world.

It could be that OpenOffice clearly lacks features. But that could be the effect not the cause. Because it does not have enough traction, not enough people are working on it to add features. Further one of MSFT's strategy is to bloat MS-Office with features mainly to claim this point. One must-have feature by one person in an important position is enough to thwart the adoption or stymie the feasibility studies of alternatives to MS-Office. With big names signing up and with corporations creating a second-source policy will put money on the table. That will attract developers and the lack features in the alternative office software will be remedied in time.

People know what happened when IE was left alone with no competition. The user base is more aware now a days. Further most developers have stopped trying to come up with the next killer application on the Windows platform. If they really come up with a real run away hit, MSFT will create a me-too app in the next release and usurp the market. So where is the incentive to create killer applications or run-away hits? That is one of the reasons why people looking to hit home runs look at the web not the stand alone PC.

Great, but...

Well, yay for IBM, but don't you think they could put a few of those developers to use making Lotus Notes suck less?

Whoope!

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 :) )

Why

Why does IBM need to create there own office suite, they should just devote there time to OpenOffice

Now that was a lengthy article

all 12 lines of it...

my god journalism is getting pathetic

The proof is in the pudding.

I'm on OSX and when it comes out on OSX, I'll DL it and see if it is good enough. I'm hoping so... I'm SO sick of MSWord...

What could make it suck?

1. If it comes out on OSX, but requires X11.
2. If it has crapola text control, esp. orphan and widow control. MSWord completely sucks at that, so this should be a fairly easy target to beat.
3. If it doesn't have a keyboard command to import an image. MSWord AND PowerPoint don't and I HATE THAT. It is such a simple thing...
4. no support for pdf. I need pdfs for my work.
5. The presentation tool had best BLOW PowerPoint away. Completely. I hate using PPT, but my students have it, not Keynote, and there is no Keynote for Windows. Grrr...
6. The spreadsheet had better be MUCH easier to use than Excel. Again, that can't be hard, because Excel oozes puss.

Any of the above would make it suck for me.

That said, I am looking forward to working with it to see how it goes.

RS

Meanwhile

Meanwhile the Italian labor union RSU is planning a virtual protest [blogs.com] in response to pay negotiations that might result in an employee pay cut. The protest is currently planned for 9/25 at IBM's corporate campus in Second Life. Hopefully someone will youtube some of the action.

Linux beta version installation

The installation in vnc and with xfce as window manager was not very smooth. There were no scripts created to call the installed applications under /opt/ibm/lotus/Symphony and the graphical installer refused to run in vnc (no display issues), but it has a '-console' switch. There are 3 .desktop files created by the installer under /usr/share/applications and with the help of them you can create scripts something like the following to start the programs:

#!/bin/bash
# start Symphony Documents Beta
# taken from /usr/share/applications/Lotus Symphony Documents.desktop
/opt/ibm/lotus/Symphony/framework/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.standalone.addin_3.0.0.20070913-1045/apps/Lotus\ Symphony\ Documents "$@"

Requirements

This is not a lightweight app.

Lotus Symphony supports both Microsoft Windows® and Linux® platforms. Note: Be sure your system meets these client system requirements: * Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista * Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5 * 900MB disk space minimum * 1GB RAM memory minimum * US English locale

No Mac OS X support.

This seems to have become a MS bashing session...

So, as someone who runs an IT shop for a non-profit, I thought I'd mention MS's pricing for non-profits:

Office Professional = $20
SQL Server 2005 = $240
Small Business Server 2003 = $68
All of their products are available to non-profits at similar discounts at TechSoup.
http://www.techsoup.org/stock/Category.asp?catalog_name=TechSoupMain&category_name=Microsoft&Page=1 [techsoup.org]

And of course Bill Gates will give more money to non-profits then everyone who has ever posted on Slashdot x100.

I'm not saying competition isn't bad, I'm just saying...

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

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.

Whoa!

I just saw a chair fly by!

So, if any of those IBM devs are reading this

Please, dear new OpenOffice developer, add the equivalent of Normal View (OO.o issue 4914 IIRC) to Writer. I've been waiting years for this, and it's clear from the comments at that issue that many others recognize the need for this view option.

No coffee yet

I read the stub of the article, and saw the "ooo" tag and thought it meant "Ooooh!". Have funny, now. Need. Coffee.

IBM, UBM, We All BM for ... never mind.

That was a great thing for them to do. That may be the push everything needed. Very smart move on their part.

Lotus Notes users receive it free?

"Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to announce a free, downloadable office suite today... There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free."

So it's free for everyone, including Lotus Notes users? What's the point of mentioning that then?

I don't trust IBM

After Clearcase, Lotus stuff and other irRational crap, my respect for IBM is ZERO

Sorry, I'll stick with MS on that.

formula error

OO values blank cells as 0 and formulas come out happy. Symphony interprets blank cells as null and formulas die. I played with it for as long as it took to download the newest OO and couldn't find a way to change blank cell evaluation. Anybody else deal with this... If I were to try it again, would I need to insert a 0 in every blank cell that is part of a formula...

Macs Excluded

The beta site does not include an Apple Mac OS X version.
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html [ibm.com]

Just like the US and Iran/Iraq

First we don't like Iran, so we help Saddam.

Then we don't like Saddam, so we give help to Iran.

I think we went back and forth a few more times. Right now, I think we like Iraq(the government anyway) and hate Iran.

I hated IBM but they haven't annoyed me for a while. I'm happy to use them against MS. :)

Not Free Software

IBM has an interesting license agreement on this software. You must agree not to redistribute, reverse-engineer, etc., EXCEPT for the non-IBM components (there's a long list of them). I'm not sure Lotus Symphony complies with all of the OSI-approved licenses of the software that it is made from.

Take care with your Linux Distros for install !

I downloaded the 200+ MB looking forward to test it on Debian Etch.
It doesn't install !!
Actually, it seems to fail the install except on the SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5 mentioned in the FAQ.
This behaviour is known:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/supportThread.jspa?messageID=4437&#4437 [lotus.com]

Re:Is it?

Ahem - This may clear it up for you. [openoffice.org]

Although the word "universal" may be a bit much.

Re:Is it?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [wikipedia.org]

It's the MS format that doesn't have ISO status. The free and open OASIS standard does.

Re:Is it?

ODF is an ISO standard (this page is supposed to show it, but it's apparently down): http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485 [iso.org]
It's been an ISO standard since November 2006.

Re:Is it?

I think ODF is an ISO standard now: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485 [iso.org]

Re:Is it?

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.

Re:Is it?

Err... No. It is.

And as far as "universal" this is called "marketing & PR". A beautiful move actually because out of all editable document standards this is the most popular one and it has some market share in all countries. So they can actually safely claim "universal" without being dragged through the mud for misselling it

Re:I don't understand

No, it is not. IBM have people working on Open Office, they will want to make OO better since they will use it as a base for its Symphony Office. The same way Sun does with Star Office.

Re:Download link

I'm not sure if these will work for everyone or not, but worth a try.

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Windows XP
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJQvRVpuvAMRGZICElHB1rt-9Co/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064446/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.8uUTWVE8JKR2RCvoT1Mv2y093nI/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe [ibm.com]

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Linux
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJTrHj5PZ1gYO1AuRVoYsLft_Ng/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064448/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.454SxXBIifOb60VOxPqOEJlyS5g/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin [ibm.com]

Re:great!

Yeah, maybe it'll eventually become decent software! Not a troll: I use OOo when I'm on windows, but it's really subpar, especially on performance. It has some neat features, and it's more than enough for casual home/school use, but it really needs some work done.

Re:great!

Interestingly enough, I attempted to visit the Open Office site after reading this article and it was down. Hmm...