IBM has announced the launch of a free Microsoft Office competitor: Lotus Symphony, at the same time Google launched its final product in the triple play office suite Presently.
According to the New York Times, IBM Lotus Symphony includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.
Lotus Symphony, like Sun Star Office is based on the Open Office code base.
Melissa Webster, an analyst for IDC said that “I.B.M. is jumping in with products that are backed by I.B.M., with the I.B.M. brand and I.B.M. service…a major boost for open source on the desktop.”
I.B.M. is said to view its Symphony desktop offerings as part of a broader technology trend that according to the NY Times “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.”
The office suite sector continues to be interesting.