I have a confession. I was never a fan of Microsoft. Microsoft's reach in personal computing is beyond question and for a long time user friendliness and Microsoft had remained synonymous...despite all that, I was never very charmed by Microsoft.
There are many reasons for my being circumspect about Microsoft. One great reason is affordability. Starting from its Operating Systems, office applications and even Chatting tools, Microsoft always charged heavily. It just makes me laugh that MSN, who started the concept of chatting once used to charge!!! And MSN Hotmail free Inbox size was 25 Mb....can you beat that? Thanks to Yahoo and Google...Microsoft is now running after us begging for registration to their Live Space!!! Quite a change of scenario, huh?
Another reason, and that brings us to this post, is lack of transparency. Microsoft's Office Suite ( I have yet to see an office that has all licenced versions of it!!!) or rather its latest version Office 2007 sucks!!!! It's resource hungry and offers nothing that open source programs like Open Office or Star Office don't!!! There is practically no reason why people or even offices will spend through nose to buy MS Office 2007. Naught.
If you are with me up to this, you may be warmly surprised that IBM, the one time looser to Microsoft is fighting back into the office productivity arena. They have started to offer Lotus Symphony which has a feature rich suite that contains word processor, spread sheet and presentation tools that combine all the functionality of Open Office, Star Office and even MS Office. This is a real platform-independent-program with an easy convertibility between .doc and .odt. And another great feature of Lotus Symphony is that you can open instances of word, spread sheet, presentation and even a browser sitting inside the same window and work back and forth in all of them (see picture).
This is from where you download Lotus Symphony absolutely free :
