IBM Prepares To Pull The Plug On Microsoft OfficeIBM Prepares To Pull The Plug On Microsoft Office

According to a recent news report, Big Blue is officially giving Microsoft Office the boot in favor of its own Lotus Symphony business productivity suite.Last week, German news site Handelsblatt.com reported that IBM wants Symphony installed on all employee desktops within 10 business days. The company currently employs around 360,000 people worldwide, and 330,000 have already complied with the order. In addition, according to the report, IBM will by the end of the year require employees to use only the open-source ODF document format instead of Microsoft Office formats.

An IBM spokesperson said that most employees already have a copy of Symphony installed on their desktops but declined to comment on other aspects of the report, citing "contractual obligations" with the company's IT suppliers.

An English-language article summarizing the Handelsblatt report is available here. Handelsblatt cited an internal IBM memorandum as its primary source for the report.

IBM released Lotus Symphony 1.3 last June. The product, which includes document editing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, is a heavily customized version of the open-source OpenOffice.org 1.x code base. Although Symphony itself is not an open-source product, IBM provides it to users free of charge.

The order apparently is not a cost-cutting measure. Instead, according to the Handelsblatt.com report, IBM wants to employ ODF -- an open-source, royalty-free format -- as company-wide document standard.

It also would not be surprising for IBM to want the world to see the company eating its own cat food.

Even a company like IBM doesn't account for more than a ripple in the Office revenue stream. Microsoft's Business Division, which includes Office, generates nearly $20 billion a year, making it an even more important profit center than the company's operating system division.

Still, a decision like this could have an interesting multiplier effect: Companies that do business with IBM will soon find themselves dealing with ODF documents whether they like it or not. That, in turn, could expose millions of additional users to the wonderful world of Microsoft Office alternatives.