IBM Announces Free Office Suite
Count me among the underwhelmed at this announcement.
IBM has joined the growing group of tech companies punting alternatives to Microsoft’s omnipresent Office suite.
Its new Lotus Symphony package, which launched yesterday, includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs and is available free of charge to Windows and Linux users.
I mean…I’m sure that the IBM folks have a nice product and everything. But do that many normal people actually switch from Microsoft Office? Being a cash-strapped geek, I switched for a while while in college to OpenOffice, which was just fine for writing essays and whatnot.
Switching completely for any business is a different story. It is painful. The lost hours of productivity that have to be dedicated to training staff on the new software is not insignificant. And having them get used to an MS Office alternative can certainly stifle work flow. The costs associated with switching are not insignificant.
When those costs are compared to the cost of staying with what works (MS Office) I don’t think we’ll see a wholesale exodus just yet.
tags: ibm, lotus, microsoft, office
Posted by Doug
I totally agree. I am a huge OpenOffice fan since they have a robust developer base as far as I can tell and it is fully compatible with Microsoft Office. However, I feel like MS Office is superior, its just not worth the discount price of $70 I would pay.
If and when I ever run a company, I would totally just get MS Office.
However, I hear the new version is rather confusing. Much like IE7 which I still can’t find a “Find this…” feature letting me search for specific text.
[…] is essentially what I was trying to convey the other day. OpenOffice.org, and other free MS Office competitors like Lotus Symphony, aren’t going to […]