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."

Nobody gets fired for..

[Dareth]

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

Will anybody get fired for buying both?

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[mister_woods]

"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."

There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

Well the beauty of bitching publicly is that someone gets to show you a solution. Thanks, I'll resume testing OOo now :)

Whoope!

[WhiteWolf666]

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 :) )

Lotus over MS

[Anonymous Coward]

We migrated away from MS Exchange/Outlook to Lotus Domino/Notes four years ago. There was lots of user hate and resentment, and much technical problems with buggy Lotus code for a long time, but now that we're at version 7.02, it's become a really stable and useful product. The application programmability, calendaring and workflow capabilities built into Notes completely blows away anything you can do in the MS Outlook world. We're using those features extensively now, whereas MS Outlook was simply just email and calendar only, not to mention being the biggest virus and malware magnet on the planet.

Getting into the MS Outlook world was like smoking crack (I wanna get real high, right f'ing now, I have no patience and I don't care how much it costs or how long the buzz lasts or how badly it trashes my health. Nothing else in the world matters).

Lotus Notes is like an old well-seasoned hippie farmer who carefully and craftily over the years has bred his own mega-strength pot, the best buds, in secret small batches in a basement hydroponics lab with grow lights, and slowly savors it one tasty little hit at a time, each of which blow your mind for all day long and won't kill you... at least not very fast anyway.

There you have it: MS is crack, Lotus is pot. This thread's done now.

Re:Meanwhile

[Just Some Guy]

The protest is currently planned for 9/25 at IBM's corporate campus in Second Life.

That is, quite likely, the stupidest thing I will have read all week.

Whoa!

[loki.jf]

I just saw a chair fly by!

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, these companies need to eat their own dog food. We use OO internally in our company.

I make dog food you insensitive clod!

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[MadChicken]

Did anyone else notice the lack of a *link* in the actual article?