By Chloe Albanesius. PCMagazine.com
IBM on Tuesday launched a beta suite of free, online office applications intended to compete with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office and boost the presence of IBM's Lotus Notes.
The IBM tools, dubbed Symphony, are available for download free of charge online and will provide access to documents, spreadsheets and presentations on machines supported by Windows and Linux desktops, according to IBM. Customers who purchase the latest version of IBM's Lotus Notes will also receive Symphony.
Symphony will also feature optional, fee-based support for businesses, Ed Brill, a business unit executive for worldwide sales at IBM/Lotus, said at a Tuesday launch event in Manhattan.
Symphony is based on the open document format (ODF), which allows for the open standards favored by IBM but generally shunned by Microsoft. IBM last week joined OpenOffice.org, an open source project founded by Sun Microsystems in 2000, to which IBM will be making code contributions.
ODF is an "incredibly important initiative as an industry," Brill said. IBM is looking to see the "proliferation of tools that use [ODF] standards."
Framing Symphony as a free, web-based open source office suite offering puts it opposite Microsoft's $150 proprietary Office suite. It is unlikely, however, that Symphony will overtake Office in the near future given the proliferation and brand-name recognition of Office. Symphony also faces competition from other free online office applications like those from Google.
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