Technology As Innovator

IBM has launched at New York a free alternative to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs. The package came under the name IBM Lotus Symphony and is available for download from the official website.

IBM Lotus Word Processor

Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format standard and allows you to import, edit and save different file formats including Microsoft Office files.

You can also export files to PDF. The set of tools is supported by Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Read more reviews

Elsa Wenzel, CNET editors’ review, IBM Lotus Symphony (Windows) Sierra, Techpin, IBM Lotus Symphony to Compete with Microsoft Office

Google Pack, the collection of applications recommended by Google, includes a new software: StarOffice, an office suite developed by Sun. In 2000 Sun released StarOffice’s source code, which became the foundation of OpenOffice.org, an open source project sponsored by Sun.

StarOffice 8 is a full-featured office suite that contains a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, applications for presentations, databases, math formulas and drawing. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), but it can also export documents as PDF out of the box. The software normally costs $70, but it’s available for free in Google Pack. It’s worth noting that StarOffice has a huge installer (more than 140 MB), so you should download it only if you have a fast Internet connection.

It will be interesting to see why Google didn’t choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.

The next step would probably be the addition of a plug-in that lets you synchronize local documents with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, so you can have the best of the both worlds: edit complicated documents offline, collaborate and store files securely online. For now, StarOffice is integrated with Google Search and Google Desktop.

Source: Google Unofficial Blog

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Comment

Google has made a huge step in the competition against Microsoft. Google is planting the habit of depending on their web applications into users. They give out their high-quality services for free, with fund from their advertisement schemes. They started with Google Notebook, Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Now comes StarOffice, a product resulting from cooperation with Sun Microsystems. Who knows if they are planning an Operating System in the next step…

Will you use the free StarOffice or the free OpenOffice or still stick with the same old giant Microsoft Office?