IBM swings and misses with latest jab at Microsoft

A German newspaper reported that IBM is mandating employees to cease using Microsoft Office and to switch to its in-house Lotus Symphony suite within 10 days.  Word has it that some 330,000 of about 360,000 employees already have made the switch.  Though given that Symphony is probably already installed on some of the corporate images, I'm not sure there's much merit in that statistic.

Rather, this move is more of a publicity stunt for the OpenDocument (ODF) format, an XML-based document format that IBM has been promoting.  IBM and Microsoft's rivalry is legendary, and thebattle has continued into the document standards space.  Starting with Office 2007, Microsoft has implemented its Open Office XML (OOXML) format, which IBM has criticized.  

IBM's internal mandate is a nice plug for ODF and might have been considered "news" two years ago when enterprises were considering or beginning Office 2007 rollouts.  But now, IBM's announcement is unlikely to prompt anyone to switch to an ODF-based solution--certainly not a switch to Lotus Symphony.  The next battleground is the hosted or Web-based productivity suite space being championed by Google with its Google Docs, GMail, and other Google Apps solutions.  Of course, Microsoft is right on Google's heels with its Office Web Applications, which currently is in tech preview.  The tech industry and organizations are eyeing this space closely, and both MS and Google are competing intensely for large enterprise deals.

While they won't be entirely insignificant, document standards will be much more of a moot point when considering Web-based document solutions--at least internally.  For organizations standardizing on an online solution, users won't be need to deal with individual files or email attachments when sharing documents.  Instead, these documents will be housed in a central workspace, such as SharePoint, where multiple users can collaboratively work on the same document without worrying about version control or handling multiple document iterations.  Sure, external document viewing as well as printing still will depend more on the document format, but PDF has pretty much become the standard format for universal readability and pre-press.  For external editing, web-based solutions may allow the creation of "public" workspaces that are accessible by users outside the organization.

Had IBM announced a web-based version of Symphony or a company-wide switch to Google Docs, that would be significant.  But IBM is no stranger to anti-Microsoft sentiments, and this internal switch to its in-house, desktop productivity suite is more or less just another public jab at its long-standing rival.

Follow Me on Twitter