IBM Corp. launches software giveaway aimed at Microsoft Office

Today, IBM plans to post on the Internet a package of its own software with applications that square off against the Microsoft's Office suite -- a word processor to rival Word, a spreadsheet to go up against Excel and business-presentation software as an alternative to PowerPoint.

The IBM package, called Symphony, can be downloaded free of charge at http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

Symphony is based on software available from Open Office, a development project that also provides the basis of Sun Microsystems Corp.'s Star Office and a Google Inc. desktop-software suite.

By introducing Symphony in an internationally recognized information-display standard called the Open Document Format, IBM also hopes to boost acceptance of that standard, which doesn't work well with Microsoft products. The stated aim of the international standard is to allow documents to be read by multiple software applications, rather than requiring any one system.

The Symphony introduction comes on the heels of Microsoft's failure last week at the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization to have its own document coding approved as an international standard.

Microsoft says it has sold 71 million licenses of its latest version of Office in the fiscal year ended June 30. But IBM hopes the move could open buyers' eyes to alternatives. Users of Symphony software will be able to view and edit most documents created in Microsoft's Word, IBM says.

IBM says it will provide support for Symphony, but it hasn't determined at what price.