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IBM's already making a difference: publicity about new office suites

Here's the article, on CNet.

"After years of watching Microsoft rake in billions of dollars from its desktop software franchise, its competitors are pouncing.

IBM on Tuesday announced the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free desktop applications based on the OpenOffice.org open-source product...." and so on.

Now, this article is about seven years too late since Sun had StarOffice out there a while ago. But Sun didn't....really....go gangbusters marketing StarOffice. There were the tshirts and bus ads, yes, a year or so ago, but not much else that I saw.

Let's hope the publicity, and recognition of OpenOffice.org and its variants, continues!

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IBM's coming to the OpenOffice.org party

Information Week puts it very nicely.

IBM's participation could make OpenOffice.org a more serious threat to Microsoft's stranglehold on the productivity software market.

Here's what I think. Benefits:
- Money
- Connections to a zillion enterprises across the world
- Money
- Name recognition among end users, which Sun doesn't have
- Money
- It's entirely possible they'll be throwing some marketing dollars behind OpenOffice.org

But here's something else. People who hear of OpenOffice.org think "Why is it free?" "What's open source?" "What's up with this craaaaazy communist kind of software development?" My point is, there's  nervousness surrounding something that's free and open source and not Controlled. (Anyone with experience with normal controlled software projects knows that's no guarantee of success, a good product, releasing on time, releasing at all, etc., but that's a separate issue.)

IBM has such a buttoned-down, conservative, reliable, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" image that that might be the single biggest advantage about IBM's participation.

As the old Klingon saying goes, "Only Nixon could go to China." Perhaps only IBM could get OpenOffice.org on 51% of desktops.

Read more:

Desktop Linux

Information Week