IBM to offer office software free in challenge to Microsoft's line

IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft's dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company is announcing the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event Tuesday in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.

IBM's 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 Microsoft's 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, IBM failed in an effort to compete head-on with Microsoft in personal computer software with its OS/2 operating system and its SmartSuite office productivity programs.

But 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, which 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's engineers have been working with OpenOffice technology for some time. But last week, IBM declared that it was formally joining the open-source group, had dedicated 35 full-time programmers to the project and would contribute code to the initiative.

Free office productivity software has long been available from OpenOffice.org, and the open-source alternative has not yet made much progress against Microsoft's 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, an analyst for IDC, a research firm. "This is a major boost for open source on the desktop."

IBM executives compare this move with the push it gave Linux, the open-source operating system, into corporate data centers. In 2000, IBM declared that it would forcefully back Linux with its engineers, its marketing and its dollars. The support from IBM helped make Linux a mainstream technology in corporations, where it competes with Microsoft's Windows server software.

IBM is also joining forces with Google, which offers the open-source desktop productivity programs as part of its Google Pack of software. Google supports the same document formats in its online word processor and spreadsheet service.

IBM views its Symphony desktop offerings as part of a broader technology trend that will open the door to faster, more automated movement of information within and between organizations.

A crucial technical ingredient, they say, is the document format used in the open-source desktop software, called the OpenDocument Format. It makes digital information independent of the program, like a word processor or spreadsheet, that is used to create and edit a document. OpenDocument Format is based on an Internet-era protocol called XML, short for Extensible Markup Language, which enables automated machine-to-machine communication.

For example, an individual investor might create a spreadsheet with automated links to market information, and prices at which he or she wants to buy or sell shares in particular stocks. The person would get an alert by e-mail or cell phone message of price swings, and could create the document for a buy or sell order with a keystroke.

Or, in a doctor's office, patient records could be linked to hospital, clinic and other databases and updated automatically.

Microsoft has the same vision of software automation, but it champions its own document format, called Office Open XML. Earlier this month, Microsoft failed in its initial effort to have Office Open XML ratified as a global technical standard by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva. The OpenDocument Format, backed by IBM, Google, Sun and others, was approved by the standards organization last year.

IBM clearly regards its open-source desktop offerings as a strategic move in the document format battle. "There is nothing that advances a standard like a product that uses it," said Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group.

The Lotus Symphony products will support the Microsoft Office formats as well as the OpenDocument Format. But analysts note that technical translators are not entirely foolproof; Symphony software may easily translate the words from a Microsoft Word document, but some of the fonts and formatting may be lost. For many users, that may not matter, they say, but for others it might.

Betsy Frost, a general manager in Microsoft's Office business, said users valued "full compatibility" with previous versions of their Office documents as well as the ease of use and familiarity of Microsoft products. And she noted that there are 500 million Office users worldwide.

Any inroads IBM and its allies make against Microsoft, analysts say, will not come easily. "Three major players--IBM, Google and Sun--are now solidly behind a potential competing standard to Office," said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester Research. "But it's a tough road. Office is very entrenched."

Entire contents, Copyright © 2010 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

[Commander_Spock]

WOW!

"The company is announcing the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony..."; Sun Set truly is followed by Sun Rise. Oh! what a beautiful and sunshine day and it looks like "old" school (Baruch College Style) all over again!

[Commander_Spock]

Deja Voux All Over Again!

"Three major players--IBM, Google and Sun--are now solidly behind a potential competing standard to Office," said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester Research. "But it's a tough road. Office is very entrenched."; Have companies (including IBM...) not "ganged up" against the Redmond Giant in similar ways before; then, it will appear as what the subject line states...

[Roy May]

Lotus Symphony

Just a word of encouragement to IBM I am a Lotus user but need to be able to open word documents, this will help no end. Well done IBM

[markokrajnc]

XML is not a protocol

XML is not a protocol. It's a standardized language for document representation.

[praveent99]

It's not standardized language

It's not standardized language either. It is just a data format.

[pilaa]

Very Interesting! Go IBM!

I was a Symphony user back in the 80's. It was one of the very first relational databases and used its own scripting language along with a spreadsheet similar to Lotus 123 and a very simple but powerful word processor. The interface was text based and not graphical however and required memorizing hot keys but used the old slash key to invoke commands. Glad to see it come back as a new, updated product. Long live FREE SOFTWARE!

[cary1]

IBM should fix Lotus Notes first

Has anyone here used Lotus Notes? If yes, then you know what I am talking about. It has the most unintuitive and ugly UI among email clients...

On top of it, you have to pay for it, and unlike Outlook, which can be bought off the shelf, Notes is only available for corporates.

I don't know what's the appeal of this piece of junk that it is still around.

Instead of using source code of open office and making it's own version, it should use source code (or atleast the graphics) of Thunderbird and implement them in Notes.

There... I feel better now

[airplay47]

well, ehhh, actually :-) (get your facts straight))

1. Notes 8 does fix your UI complaints by far.
(out since august 2007, check <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://ibm.com/lotus/notes" target="_newWindow">http://ibm.com/lotus/notes</a> ).

(( Well Outlook never was intuitive, either... It just works the the same boring way every other product from Redmond does, hence "user acceptance" etc. Anyway, this is "taste", and clearly debatable. So: ))

2. Notes is SO MUCH MORE THAN EMAIL. It (and its server Domino) powers the business processes of more than 128 million (and still increasing) users world wide, online/offline, replicated, in sync, web or desktop, in ONE SINGLE INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT across multiple platforms (win/mac/linux etc).
For Enterprises THAT's COLLABORATION, THAT's ROI, THAT's BUSINESS. Not just EMAIL.


There... I feel better now... :-)

- but seriously, check it out. It's more than you think, and it's gotten a lot prettier than when you last saw it! A lot! :-)

best regards,

/airplay

[Erich Eulert]

Get updated, do not create FUD, be professional

Have you seen the new Notes 8 interfase, take a look before making a comment as this. I am a user and i am really sorry for people like you (probably from MS) making this comments of an old version of the product.

[BrianLevy]

Notes - A Whole New Story

Been around Notes since version 4 and through 8 Beta. Each version has shown it has kep up with its core concept. Yes, there were and still compromises. The weak point for me is its contact manager. I am spoiled by Lotus Organizer. Also, in version 5, 6 and 7, it integrated better with Office than IBM's own SmartSuite, something I could not figure out. Why have a product with better intergration with a competitor's product than your own. When 7 came out it did not even offer the file for SmartSuite that it had in 6. I called IBM and they included it in an update release.

Also, have been using opensource since StarOffice and it has really made inroads. I even got the software company for my contact manager/calendar/e-mail client, etc. to add OpenOffice to its selection for word processing for mail merge, etc. and export to spreadsheet. I have been using OxygenFree (replaced OpenOffice Pro) and it is better for office use.

After working the Notes 8 Beta with its integrated Symphony for some time, my first thought was this is where MS finally gets passed in an integrated Office package. It just ties it all together so nicely. Notes Client 8 still has a few things to work out but I was using a Beta. If I did not use a contact system that included a time and billing module that works so well for me, with 8, I simply switch over to it full time.

IBM does need to rethink their distribution and at least offer it to the nonbusiness market. You can buy it but it is a pain. Since their market is corporate, catering to the individual is too expensive for their business. I understand. But, they could storm the Bastille if they simply released it as a free download to individual end users. Would not be hard to do.

As for your comments about Notes, well you may be too used to MS products and the whole world really does not march to it. I found Notes to be more intuitive to use than MS. On my computer at work I do have Office loaded and occasionally will use but find it difficult to work with and non intuitive. It takes a short while before I figure it out. Just the other side of the coin.

[bluvg]

"For many users, that may not matter, they say"

Nah, most businesses won't mind if their users have to comb over for conversion errors every document that they share with a client that uses Microsoft Office. Productivity "may not matter" to most users, right?

99% success with conversion isn't good enough. It still takes its toll, because you never know when that 1% may come back to bite you--you end up having to review every document for errors. It would be different if you knew for sure where the conversion errors are, but it never works that way. WordPerfect's converters are probably the best available, and it's the same thing--you can't rely on it to produce a 100% conversion faithful to the original. And since it's not 100%, you're stuck reviewing the entire document--and every document.

[Commander_Spock]

You have a very good point!

... and, as a point of reference here is an extract from a 1998 Lotus Development Corporation communication; "Re: Concerning the issues with 1-2-3 that are talked about in the documentation you gave me, most of the issues are related to converting files between older and newer versions of product and converting documents between Lotus and Microsoft. Anytime a file is saved backwards or saved with an older file format than the format the file was created under, such as saving a 1-2-3 , 97 file for Windows 95 into a WK1 format for DOS, then naturally we are expected to loose certain features due to technology and features that are present now that were not present 8 - 10 years ago. Similarly, if we try to convert a file from Lotus into Excel or Excel into Lotus, due to differences in the products not every feature will be converted perfectly with the file filters that are available. Both Lotus and Microsoft create similar spreadsheet programs; however, there are several differences in both programs and these differences will remain to distinguish the products apart. We do try to design conversion filters that will allow as much of the file formats as possible to be exchanged and converted without disrupting the actual file design and format.

In one of your letters you made mention of the @IRR and @ERR functions in the 1-2-3 product. By design the @IRR (notably "absent" in Open Office) will calculate the Internal Rate of Return; where the @ERR is used in conjunction with other formulas, posted was an "ERR" showing an error was received in the calculations. As far as I can see in the program I cannot find an @ERR function that will allow us to calculate an Economic Rate of Return". Therefore, like you have quite rightly stated above - "99% success with conversion isn't good enough" as far as some "spreadsheet" scenarios may be concerned.

[praveent99]

IBM lost twice before and will lose again.

IBM lost with with DOS, which lead to Windows and lost with OS/2,DB2 and is going to lose with Free Office Software again.

Because the focus is shifting to Web based office software like Google's.

Personally I feel, people already using office, will not even try free office software except for a few techies.

New people looking to buy office software are moving to the web.

Where is the money ? Hosted applications is the future of the web or office.

I feel, instead of competing with office software, IBM should focus on innovating secure hosted applications for the corporate with support charges etc and give no support versions to general public.

On the other hand, Microsoft will see diminishing revenues from Office software unless they really shift their base to hosted applications.

I think, IBM or SUN are wasting time trying to beat Microsoft than focussing on next generation web products.

[jbk3801]

When will Symphony be available?

When will we be able to use it?