IBM announced this morning the return of Symphony, a suite of office applications including spreadsheet, presentation, and word processing. Symphony bundles the OpenOffice-based document editors that are currently a part of Notes 8.
Perhaps most importantly IBM is making Symphony available as a free download. IBM has also set up a community support site (fee-based support options will be offered as well). IBM announced that it is joining the OpenOffice project and will contribute code to the project.
I've yet to see a feature comparison between Symphony and Microsoft Office, but assuming there is a roughly equal set of features, it will be very difficult to get enterprises to pay of Office when they can use Symphony for free. We may have just seen a major inflection point for office desktop suites.
IBM also made a few other announcements this morning, including a hosted offering for Lotus Notes 8, and a mobile client. They also announced new features in Notes 8.0.1, as well as enhancements to Portal and Quickr.
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Irwin, Thanks for the news about Symphony. Sounds great to check out. Any ideas if it will be available for the Mac?
Dan
Posted by: Dan York | Sep 18, 2007 at 22:30