IBM Lotus Symphony

Call it an Office showdown… IBM issues a challenge to Microsoft’s popular Office suite of software with free alternativesUsability, portability and price. These are the three battlegrounds on which IBM hopes to woo customers away from Microsoft. For well over a decade, Microsoft’s Office has been the default answer for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Other players had never really made a dent since Office took over.But now there are viable challengers. Last month, IBM began offering Lotus Symphony – a suite of all three applications available as a test version. The suite had been available as part of its Lotus 8 software, but is now available as a free download for Windows and Linux PCs.By comparison, the cheapest version of Microsoft Office costs well over $100.