IBM’s Symphony, Music to Our Ears

William M. Bulkeley of The Wall Street Journal wrote an article on 9/18/2007 dated paper, entitled “Free IBM Software Is Bid To Challenge Microsoft Office”, announcing the re-investment of the Big Blue into the software application business. Not just any software application business, Open Source Software Application business with its new Office Suite named Symphony. The new product is based on Open Office Project and joins similar offerings from Sun Microsystems’ Star Office and Google’s desktop-software suite.

IBM has a track record of supporting open standards, and open source in order to pursue strategies ultimately benefiting its business objectives. This is very natural of course as IBM is a publicly owned and for profit enterprise. Big Blue’s support for Eclipse Foundation, Linux, and its previous open source based acquisitions are well documented. I once heard a Gartner analyst say “Among the top Enterprise Software companies (Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and IBM), IBM has the least to lose from open standards and open source.” IBM does not want to be known as a software company, but rather a technology services firm.

IBM, however, will support any software initiative that would pressure its competitors. Their support for Linux and Apache was to check Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise server software business. Eclipse was a strategic move against .Net and Sun’s Java Platforms among the developers. Symphony is clearly aimed at Microsoft’s Office Suite of products, which we all love to hate.

IBM’s continued interest in the open source software business brings immediate and strong validation to our business model. They plan to give away the software in return for paid support and services, though the prices have not been announced yet. Symphony will be integrated with Lotus Notes and support IBM’s collaboration strategy as well.

Few things that were not clear in the article were all around community based collaboration for Symphony. It is stated that, Symphony will not be available at www.openoffice.org, which is odd given that it is based on Open Office software. At the same time, IBM plans to give code to Open Office, developed by its engineers, that makes it easier to use by people with limited vision. If IBM engineers will be the primary developers and the community of Symphony, they will not be truly leveraging the power of the open source. And that would be a loss for both the IBM and the open source model.