From: "Rich Gauszka" 

from http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32461.html

IBM dismisses OpenOffice as child's play

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Posted: 22/08/2003 at 02:26 GMT



IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software,
but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to
one of free software's most needed products.

Karen Smith, vice president of Linux strategy and market development at
IBM, has been telling a number of publications that no open source
equivalent of Microsoft Office exists. Lest you think Smith has been living
in a cave, rest easy. She does appear to be acquainted with OpenOffice and
its StarOffice incarnation from Sun Microsystems. These suites, however,
are not good enough for IBM.

"What we haven't seen become available is a full replacement for
Microsoft Office," Smith told ComputerWire.

Smith's comment points to an obvious fact - neither OpenOffice nor
StarOffice have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft's suite. As
caretaker of IBM's market development, however, she should see the need for
promoting the open source products as a market creating opportunity for the
Linux community as a whole.

The OpenOffice code has been downloaded more than 25 million times, and
large OEMs such as Sony and Fujitsu-Siemens are shipping the suite with
their PCs. The software's success helps out a valuable part of the Linux
developer community and is key to making Linux on the desktop a reality for
everyday PC users.

IBM's Linux aspirations sit on the server as opposed to the desktop. The
company's PC business is hardly thriving, but what's left of it is centered
around Microsoft. In that context, bashing OpenOffice makes some sense.

In a larger context, however, IBM's decision to take a pro-Microsoft stance
on the desktop doesn't jibe with its billion dollar actions. Smith has been
traveling the world for some time, extolling the virtues of Linux to a wide
audience. She is the queen of hippies in the Peace, Love and Linux camp.

Smith tells Computer Business that IBM is taking a portal-based approach to
delivering desktop functionality for end users. The kicker here is that
Global Services will play a large role in customizing the desktop,
messaging and collaboration apps for each customer. Is this IBM creating a
fleet of custom desktops when a standard already exists?

IBM's approach is vastly different to that of relative Linux late-comer
Sun. Sun is set to release its Mad Hatter desktop and Mad Hatter Management
Server next month. With Mad Hatter, Sun has taken the best bits of the open
source world, including the StarOffice productivity suite, GAIM messaging
client and Evolution for mail and calendaring. Guess what? Mad Hatter
desktops will connect into IBM's own Lotus Notes too.

What does Sun think of IBM's dismissal of OpenOffice?

"I think that is pretty funny coming from a company that led the
office suite revolution with Lotus 123," said Peder Ulander *, a
director of marketing at Sun. "That product basically doesn't exist
anymore. They had their shot at the office suite and didn't make it."

Sun is using Mad Hatter to take aggressive pricing shots at Microsoft but
is not being over-zealous about the potential markets it hopes to serve.
The company is going after customers that employ a large number of workers
to do relatively fixed-function tasks. Bells and whistles are not required.

As Ulander points out, these customers will need servers to manage all of
their PCs, messaging, etc, which opens a nice non-Microsoft hardware sale
for vendors. IBM could easily get behind this approach.

Linux on the mainframe might be interesting to a few customers, but it's
not the OS's future. If IBM wants it's Linux investment to keeping paying
off, the vendor should push solid open source achievements instead of
plugging Microsoft where it's convenient.

OpenOffice helps keep Linux in the public eye and keeps it creeping toward
consumers' desktops. This is good for the Linux community and good for IBM

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