IBM offering free office productivity software
NEW YORK: IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsofts dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.
The company was scheduled to announce the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event here Tuesday. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.
IBMs Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsofts mainstay Office programs - Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker.
In the 1990s, International Business Machines failed as it competed head-on with Microsoft in personal computer software with its OS/2 operating system and its SmartSuite office productivity programs.
IBM is taking a different approach this time. Its offerings are versions of open-source software developed in a consortium called OpenOffice.org. The original code traces its origins to a German company, Star Division, that Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Sun later made the desktop software, now called StarOffice, an open-source project, in which work and code are freely shared.
IBM engineers have been working with OpenOffice technology for some time. But last week, IBM declared that it was formally joining the open-source group.
OpenOffice.org has long been a source of free office productivity software, and the open-source alternative has not yet made much progress against Microsofts Office. But IBM, analysts note, has such reach and stature with corporate customers that its endorsement could be significant.
“IBM is jumping in with products that are backed by IBM, with the IBM brand and IBM service,” said Melissa Webster of the research firm IDC. “This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”
IBM executives compare the move with the push the company gave Linux, the open-source operating system, with corporate data centers.
