Composes Open Document SymphonyÂ

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 19 September 2007, 16:54

IBM ANNOUNCED in New York City yesterday that it will offer a complete set of office productivity applications as free downloads. Branded as IBM Lotus Symphony, the office suite will include word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs. Implementing the XML based file and display formats of the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) specification, Lotus Symphony will be based upon software written by the Open Office coalition, which IBM has joined along with Sun, Google and others. Last week IBM announced that it has dedicated 35 developers to contributing code to Open Office.The rest of IBM’s Lotus line of email, messaging and work group collaboration applications, led by its flagship Lotus Notes product, are proprietary. IBM has invested significant resouces in Lotus for over a decade, ever since it bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995. But its Lotus SmartSuite line of office applications failed to gain traction in attempting to challenge Microsoft Office during the late 1990s. Â

By offering its flavor of Open Office under the Lotus banner, IBM may be hinting that it will add features to Open Office to integrate its applications with preexisting Lotus software.Â

It’s possible that IBM might even release basic versions of other Lotus applications as open source, although IBM has made no indication that it’s considering that.

By joining Sun and Google to develop and promote open source software products implementing ODF, IBM adds welcome resources and marketing power to lure users away from the high costs and vendor lock-in of Microsoft Office.

IBM executives compare its ODF initiative with the support it gave to the open source system Linux by promoting its use in corporate data centers, support that helped make Linux very successful over the last several years.

Melissa Webster, an analyst for research firm IDC, said “IBM is jumping in with products that are backed by IBM, with the IBM brand and IBM service. This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”

We strongly agree, and we wish IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Sun, Google and Open Office every success against the dark side of software innovation incarnate in expensive closed, proprietary protocols and document formats

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42476

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