IBM gives free concert with Lotus Symphony 1.0

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 04 June 2008 11:19

Business IT - Technology

The arrival of Lotus Symphony alongside other free office suites such as OpenOffice.org and its relatives including the low-cost StarOffice form Sun can only increase pressure on Microsoft to reduce the price of Office.

While Microsoft can exploit close links with its other software such as SharePoint, individuals and businesses that mainly need basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools are well served by the free suites.

Furthermore, 'in the cloud' productivity applications such as Google Apps also deliver these functions for free (or low cost for some extra capabilities), without the need to install software and without being tied to a particular computer. Google Sites even provides some of SharePoint's functionality.