IBM to challenge MS, offer free office software

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 on 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.