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News this week has been all about the Office suites battling it out.  Today, Google Docs added its latest application, Presentations. Yesterday Zimbra was purchased by Yahoo for 350 millions clams. And a couple days ago, Zimbra and Microsoft were trash talking the arrival of Google Presently.

Yup, it's been a Office suite filled week.  Today, IBM has announced that they will be releasing their office suite based on the Open Office source code, Lotu Symphony completely free of charge.  Of course this is another theat for the market leader Microsoft whose office suite is still $60.

Although, IBM is not getting any hate maillike Google Docs received, it seems that Microsoft is not much worried about IBM's new baby.

Well all we know for now is that the Lotus Symphony package will include a Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentations.  Whether or not Microsoft's dominant position is going to be replaced by either any of the free office suites, we do not know yet nor do I feel it's going to happen anytime soon.

As for now, IBM says, "I.B.M. is jumping in with products that are backed by I.B.M., with the I.B.M. brand and I.B.M. service…a major boost for open source on the desktop.

I.B.M. is said to view its Symphony desktop offerings as part of a broader technology trend that according to the NY Times “will open the door to faster, more automated movement of information within and between organizations…a crucial technical ingredient, they say, is the document format used in the open-source desktop software, called the OpenDocument Format. It makes digital information independent of the program, like a word processor or spreadsheet, that is used to create and edit a document.”

So far, that's all we got too. 

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