IBM Throws its Active Support behind OpenOffice.org (at last)

Posted by Andy_Updegrove on Sep 10, 2007 4:12 PM EDT
ConsortiumInfo.org Standards Blog; By Andy Updegrove 		Mail this story
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In what many will see as a long-overdue move, OpenOffice.org announced today that IBM will become an active supporter of, and contributor to, OpenOffice, the leading ODF-compliant competitor to Microsoft Office. The question that many will be asking is this: What took so long?

That's a query upon which many have speculated, but which no one has ever definitively answered, on which more below.

The news is significant principally because the ability of ODF compliant software to meet end-user, and especially enterprise end-user, needs has arguably lagged the success of the ODF standard itself to achieve credibility in the marketplace.

In order to capitalize on this success, vendors need to be able to offer customers products that can compete toe to toe with Microsoft Office. OpenOffice derives from a code base whose development stretches back to the dawn of desktop computing. With OpenOffice available for free, and StarOffice at a very significant discount from Office, OpenOffice clearly offers the most credible and formidable ODF-compliant competitor to Office.

That leaves the question of why this announcement comes now, and why "now" has been so long delayed.

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My favorite part... dinotrac 4 1,281 Sep 11, 2007 12:12 PM

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