Now that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has begun to go after Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office, International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) wants a piece of the action as well.
Big Blue will launch a new, free office-like product called Symphony. It will be available on the internet, and it is free.
According to The Wall Street Journal "Symphony is based on software available from Open Office." The same foundation is used for Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Google's desktop applications processes. The product also has functions from Notes, a product IBM bought years ago. Notes was almost run out of the market by Microsoft. IBM hopes that the free software application will help it sell more recent versions of Notes, which includes e-mail and instant messaging.
Does the IBM launch matter? Probably not. Nor does the recent upgrade of Google Apps to include software similar to PowerPoint. Microsoft has about 500 million desktop applications running on PCs and the Journal writes the company has "sold 71 million licenses of its latest version of Office in the fiscal year ended June 30." The Office software sells for slightly more than $100.
Getting customers to leave Microsoft, with its huge installed base, is almost impossible.
Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 247wallst.com.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-18-2007 @ 12:11PM
shamir said...
i don't think getting out of ms office is quite impossible. SUN office is providing more facilities than MS, and it is user friendly too. It needs just time to get people acquainted with the free software.
9-18-2007 @ 6:02PM
Chuck Hoover said...
I think Mr. McIntyre is over estimating the difficulty of learning the Open Office software as distributed by Sun Microsystems or the new Symphony from IBM. The software components equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint look and "feel" very similar to the Microsoft versions and every file produced by a Microsoft component that I have tried to process using Open Office has been 100% problem free.
And, please, remember the 80-20 rule. Of all of the sophisticated options available from Microsoft, the average user is probably lucky if they use 20% of the functionality. Please also remember that the major weakness of all PC products is the generally poor user guides and other help tools. I'd hate to guess how much I've spent buying third-party user guides, university texts and such and still find that I'm no where near fully understanding all of the capability offered. Yet I've been using all three heavily and productivily for about twenty years. I'm always amazed when I sit down with co-workers and find they are more expert than me in some areas while I'm able to dazzle them in many others. We all invest in our acquisition of know- ledge to the point where we can get our job done. That doesn't come close to exploiting the full potential of any of these components. Therefore, I think Mr. McIntyre can't be speaking for the vast majority of the 70 million license holders.