With 11 years at Microsoft under his belt, it’s surprising to learn that Keith Curtis is betting on open source software to triumph over proprietary software. In his recent book, ‘After the Software Wars’, Curtis pins his hopes on harnessing the wisdom of the crowds to achieve common goals with increased efficiency, speed and less resource consumption.
Microsoft has not looked fondly at open source over the years, even claiming that free and open source software (FOSS) violated over two hundred of Microsoft’s patents. Recalling this mudslinging makes ‘After the Software Wars’ all the more ironic, as the author’s biography flies directly in the face of his Microsoft heritage.
There is perhaps no better display of collaboration than the open source movement. Watching free software permeate the enterprise, I can’t help but cheer for the underdog. Although open source completely undermines a free market economy and turns standard modes of production on its head, it’s a movement more and more organizations are leveraging to drive down costs.
Richard Mark Soley of OMG, Object Management Group was one of the CXOs who grilling the cloud computing team of Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com during last night’s session, “Evening in the Cloud.” The big question on his mind was “Can I leave one of you and move to the other?” And the simple answer is “no,” but everyone recognizes that problem and they’re all looking to build standards so that one day they can say “yes.” Soley, a user of cloud computing today, is eager to move more over, but not until he’s comfortable that he won’t be locked in with any one specific service provider.
IBM today announced IBM Lotus Symphony, a suite of software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This places IBM in competition with Google who recently began distributing Sun’s Star Office Suite as part of the Google Pack. But of course the real competition for IBM, Google and others is Microsoft and its dominent Office suite. IBM already lost this battle to Microsoft in the 90s when Office crushed it’s Lotus SmartSuite offering. Will Symphony’s battle with Office take a different course?
IBM is taking a different path this time by offering an open source product built around the Open Document Format (ODF) and by making the software available for free download. IBM’s announcement also emphasizes the collaborative aspects of their new offering and the ability to build composite applications through integration with existing business processes. The IBM Lotus Symphony suite includes Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. The tools support Windows and Linux desktops and have the ability to output to the PDF format.
Open source office apps have not been a significant threat to Microsoft’s dominence in the market so far. But with support from Sun, Google and IBM brewing and with new pressures from web-based offerings entering the market, the next battle for office productivity suites may be officially underway.
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Dec 2nd, 2008 |
