IBM to offer free office software, targeting Microsoft
www.chinaview.cn 2007-09-19 14:22:33
BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- IBM Corp. is to start offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, in another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite, media reported Tuesday.
The company was scheduled to announce the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event Tuesday.
The name for the suite is the same name IBM used for its first integrated productivity suite, which it offered in the 1980s but which never took off with customers.
Mike Rhodin, general manager of Lotus Software for the IBM Software Group, said the company brought back the name to "herald in a new age" of productivity software.
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.
Microsoft's Office suite of products already faces some competition from Google Inc's online tools, called Google Apps.
