IBM Delivers Free Office Suite, Not Web-Based; News Deemed Unfortunate

More IBM news today. Perhaps the company’s doing some much-needed catching up in the PR dept?

The company has announced the delivery of Lotus Symphony – free of charge. Should one applaud? Should one care?

I don’t know. There’s a good deal of truth to the free-equals-good argument. Free software is a wonderful thing. It gets a lot of people producing things and enjoying things already produced who usually wouldn’t be able (due to financial constraints). But there’s also truth to the point made by some that when something’s got monetary value attached to it, it often carries with it an impression of greater quality and refinement.

Personally, as far as pricing of software is concerned, I stand somewhere in the middle. I see the towering role played by Microsoft and the irrational pricing structure it has established for its newest offerings as ridiculous and worth avoiding. Yet I also view projects like Open Office and now IBM’s Lotus Symphony as items which should have price tags of their own, if only to allow for a revenue stream that would make possible the establishment of solid, ever-present developer cores and tech support teams to bring the respective collections of applications to 2007-style modernity.

More than anything, however, I wish to see an industry-wide push to migrate from localized solutions to those Web-based. Whether we’re talking of IBM, Microsoft, or the open source lovers behind the Open Office suite, development teams should be looking serious to models of Google Docs and Zoho and such for clues as to what they themselves should be working to deliver in the seasons ahead.

While Web-based productivity suites are more or less in their infancy at this point, they hold a very valuable card MS Office and its “copycats” do not: collaboration.

As we who follow Web trends know very well, the ability to increase collaboration within the corporate structure is gaining, well, collaborators, and as far as long-term forecasts go, the folks milking their “old-world” cows for all they’re worth are simply going to make the transition to the “new way” harder for themselves later on. Google and other “early adopters” of the Web-centric software development mindset will continue to build on their established offerings, while Microsoft and others will start somewhere at the point where the first-comers and first-servers began. Thus, the sooner Microsoft enters the fighting ring, the better for Microsoft. Unfortunately, we see no signs of an imminent or even close-to-imminent Web release by the company. And IBM? Definitely not. (Yes, I am aware that this primarily began as an IBM news brief, but the issue is larger than just one particular company, so bear with this “bigger picture” examination.)

Microsoft does still certainly have its name to “make up” for lost time. It’s not impossible to foresee the company jump to the front of the line of Web-based office suites when it eventually decides to lay those roots down. But the company has to also consider the possibility that another company just might steal its thunder before it’s even made its first move. If Google or another outfit delivers something better many months, or even years ahead of Redmond, there’s no telling what can happen. We all know how quickly things can change in the tech world. As many cards as there are stacked against Microsoft’s competition at the moment, there’s still room for a significant shift to occur. Mind you, you shouldn’t hold your breath for one, but, as they say, you never know.

And so, I end with this. IBM’s announcement of a free Lotus Symphony suite today means little. As do news bites concerning recent releases of Open Office and Sun StarOffice.

In fact, the biggest news today in the world of productivity apps concerns the addition of a presentation-making component to Google Docs (which was recently loosed of the “& Spreadsheets” title extension, for those curious to know). Enough said.