IBM Takes on Microsoft With OpenOffice Suite

IBM Corp. is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. ADVERTISEMENT The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet-- Lotus Symphony, as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time.