IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite 378
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."
Branding madness (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:3, Interesting)
Recall that Sun also tried this office competition, and tied it to a system that would allow firms to have predictable office application costs. It did not seem to work so well.
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. Combine this with the fact that the MS Office suite is often in a web of legal limitations, and I can't see that this IBM offering is any better than anyone else. Perhaps existing *nix users will gravitate toward the IBM name, but I doubt others will.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
notes (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
And will it... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Notes on Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:2, Interesting)
hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of those contractors and federal employees will use MS office and other MS products at home because it is what they are familiar with at work. Their kids will use MS Office, and their schools will also - because it is familiar.
Sure there might be a lawsuit here and there when MS forgets to pay their congressman/senator, but as long as the DOJ uses MS products while suing MS for monopolistic practices, buisiness will continue as usual at MS.
Re:I don't understand (Score:1, Interesting)
How many versions are there? (Score:1, Interesting)
screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Free? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And will it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've tested it with a couple of SmartSuites files -- Word Pro and 1-2-3 -- and it seems to open them fairly nicely. They've must've tweaked the OpenOffice engine a bit to get them to work better with SmartSuite files, which "vanilla" OpenOffice sometimes had problems with.
One thing I like about it is the "tabbing" system -- whether I've got 1-2-3 files or Word Pro files open, they're all presented in a unified window, with tabs denoting the different documents. Now, that's something I'd like to see in other office suites.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:3, Interesting)
People keep saying this, but not backing it up.
I've backed it up, in great detail and with many objective examples of features and specific bugs, in multiple previous posts. I didn't see the point in repeating all of that here, but please do Google my posting history (search for things like Writer and Word) if you're interested.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo.
I respectfully disagree. While I really am grateful to the OpenOffice guys for giving me a basic office suite I can use for free at home, I think OO is damaging in the long run, because (a) it insists on trying to be a Word clone, and (b) it sucks up most of the community volunteers, commercial resources and publicity that could otherwise be used to work on a better alternative.
No-one in Windows world has yet produced a really good tool for writers who want to produce beautiful documents efficiently, nor a really easy-to-use spreadsheet that still supports powerful data analysis and well-presented graphs, nor a presentation package that actually supports making good presentations rather than bullet-laden monstrosities, nor for that matter a good PIM that supports serious corporate infrastructure but still provides good e-mail, scheduling, etc. There is huge demand for these things, but since no-one is currently doing them (in part because they're all working on Office, OpenOffice, and various other less good versions of the same things, I presume) the market doesn't even realise what it's missing.
Visibility and discussion itself is good (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:notes (Score:1, Interesting)
No, I'm not kidding...
http://www.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/productivitytools [ibm.com]
Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are those apps from their old Lotus suite? I used those way back in the OS/2 2.x days, when they were the only option for OS/2 Office Suites. The apps don't look like they've improved much since then.
Or, are they (as some here claim) based on OpenOffice?
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:3, Interesting)
OO is in an unfortunate position that, if they were to have a higher limit, people would use the extra cells and then try to save their files in ms formats, resulting in them not loading. And this would be blamed in OO for having poor compatibility, rather than MS for having the 65535 rows limit.
Re:Ms, your case is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The proof is in the pudding. (Score:3, Interesting)
NeoOffice? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been using OpenOffice.org since version 1, and I'm quite happy with it. More importantly, very few people seem to notice that I'm using it so the compatibility isn't as big a deal as they want you to believe.
Just give it a try, it's not like it costs anything