According to the New York Times, IBM has indicated they are offering Symphony, an office suite based on the very solid OpenOffice. It looks like IBM will be devoting some development resources to the project as well. While the NYT focuses on the competition with Microsoft, there is much more to it.

This is great for users of all stripes, but I think small and medium sized businesses will win the most. This is the segment that will pay retail or buy small blocks of licenses. A free set of office applications that can open Office format files is really useful – but for smaller businesses I’m sure the support services that Sun (StarOffice), IBM and the web communities can offer will be hugely valuable. The other big will (hopefully) be the increased use of the OpenDocument format as opposed to proprietary formats that cannot inter-operate. Another cool feature – create a document in OpenOffice, load it up to Google Documents and access it anywhere, any time, collaborate with others, and save it back to an offline location for version control, backup, etc.

Over the next few years, I believe will see further separation of data formats and the software used to interact with them. The money making strategy can no longer be ‘vendor lock in’ based on formats and market dominance. The future will be providing better support, services, processes, consulting, accessibility and cross platform inter-interoperability.

Thanks IBM for pushing this exciting trend forward.