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

[unity100]

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

[SCHecklerX]

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.

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

[scottsk]

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:Ms, your case is lost

[PunkOfLinux]

Did anyone else notice the lack the mention of Openoffice in the actual article?

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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:Ms, your case is lost

[Gr8Apes]

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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

[betterunixthanunix]

"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."

People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not. But I can think of a few things that OOo has that MS Office does not. People who have trouble with OOo seem to be people who were originally trained with MS Office, and so it should come as no surprise that they are having trouble. Yes, things are in different places. Yes, things have different names.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.

WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[NoOneInParticular]

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

[unity100]

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.

You're crazy

[DogDude]

First off, please learn how to capitalize.

Secondly, Open Office is nowhere close to "critical mass", and they're certainly nowhere near de-facto. In order for either of those things to be true, lots of people have to be using said software. Open Office usage, in my experience, is virtually non-existent.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[seasunset]

I am guessing that you either did business with IBM a long time ago or that you really don't know what you are talking about.

Currently, most IBM solutions are fairly open. This up to their mainframe offer where you can install a very standard Linux distro (mainly SuSE, but also Red Hat or Debian).

Most of their frameworks (like application servers) are standard based. Sometimes they suck from a technical point of view, but from an openness perspective they are more than OK.

Yes, 10 years ago IBM was really bad (TM) with regards to lock in. Not anymore from my experience.

The proof is in the pudding.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[2Bits]

the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF.

Yeah, I'll be more impressed when these firms ditched MS Office totally, and replace it with OO for internal use, and maybe force their suppliers to also use OO (otherwise, no deal!). I want to see all their sales people use exclusively OO too.

I remember that a few years, when OO was just out, a Sun's product manager was doing a presentation using PPT (surprise, surprise!), while bitching about how MS Office was so bad, and how OO was going to be the future. After listening to half an hour of bitching and moaning, I couldn't stand it anymore, and said:"Listen, if you think that MS Office is so bad, and OO is going to be the future, why are you not using OO? And what are you using right now?" He wasn't amused though.

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

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sydb]

user inserts rows

Warning!

If you add more rows you will not be able to share this spreadsheet with Microsoft Excel users, as Microsoft Excel does not support more than 65,535 rows.

Would you like to continue adding rows? [yes] [no] [ ]don't ask this again.

Re:Why

[Whatsisname]

Why don't you learn to spell?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anubis350]

Lemmings don't *think* they can walk on air, they *know* it the problem is, gravity doesn't agree with them (SAT time kids, lemmings::most MS techs as gravity::_______ ):-p

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

[Big wet dog]

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...

Competitor emulation = inferior software.

[Kadin2048]

I turned a friend onto OO.o a couple of years ago. He used it for about a year, then went back to Office. He said he gave it a shot, but just couldn't get comfortable with it. To me, that is an HONEST assessment. I don't buy the blanket argument that OO.o is "just as good". MS Office is the leader, they have to be knocked off... it has to be proven, most likely repeatedly, that OO.o is just as good if not better. Hopefully with someone like IBM behind it, it can get a foothold in the business world. You can reach a lot of people that way.

The problem, as I see it, is that OpenOffice spends an inordinate amount of time trying to be Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint. That's not a recipe for success. No matter how hard they try, they're never going to be MS Word. And to a certain extent, I think there's a sort of "uncanny valley" for software: if you make a piece of software that tries to feel like something else, and you get 99% of the way there, the 1% will drive people nuts. Sometimes it's better just to go for compatibility and stop trying to emulate the other guy.

What I'm a little disappointed in is that there isn't more emphasis on doing things better than Word. If you look at the places where other OSS software has succeeded, it's generally because the software is just honestly better at something than the commercial/closed-source competition, not just because the OSS one happens to be free of cost. Linux gets used a lot by industry because it's a good server platform, and for many years was a lot more stable and had a lot more features that Windows (arguably both are still true but I don't want to get into a discussion of it). The purchase price of software is a very small factor in most people's decisions to use it, as it should be.

I think Apple does a fairly good job of this; at least philosophically (their execution sometimes stumbles). You don't see them trying to doggedly emulate Excel in Numbers. It's generally compatible with Excel, and they tout this as a feature, but then they seem to have sat down and said "what can we beat Excel at?" And so it has a much slicker interface, produces nicer charts, etc. And it's adoption rate is faster than Calc's (although it's limited only to Mac users so the market it can hope to grab is smaller).

As long as a project has as its aim the emulation of an existing piece of software, it's always going to be burdened with an inferiority complex. And users may not totally understand that, but they'll sense it, and in many cases decide that they want the "real thing" even if it costs them extra.

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

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Master of Transhuman]

"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.