The software, called Lotus Symphony, is based on IBM’s Lotus family of products and includes document processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools that rival the Word, Excel and PowerPoint tools found in Microsoft’s Office suite.
IBM said that Symphony can be downloaded for free. In contrast, the Home Edition of the Microsoft Office suite retails on the Internet at around $120.
IBM joins a growing band of companies like Google and Zoho that are offering free Office-like applications. Last year Google has launched a set of online Office tools called Google Apps that are targeted at small and medium sized businesses. The applications and data are hosted by Google, for free, with ad support. A fee-based Premier Edition of Google Apps is also offered.
Separately, IBM said that it will also offer its Lotus email and collaboration products as a service accessible through a Web browser. IBM said that customers will be able to deploy the software without installing anything on their own computers and access the application and data from servers at IBM’s data centers.
Our View
IBM is resuming an old rivalry with Microsoft in a space that many thought it had conceded to the Redmond software giant many years ago – the Office desktop. While it is true that Office is the closest thing to ubiquitous in the business software world, it’s also still quite expensive.
Ironically, IBM and Google, which are both offering free alternatives, are competing with Office on commodity price, something that Microsoft usually does. This is a bold move by IBM since it attacks a lucrative $12bn per year Microsoft revenue stream. However, both IBM and Google have their work cut out trying to catch up in terms of building up a critical mass of users and providing more compelling functionality to match the richness of Microsoft Office.
