Today is a bad day for Microsoft. Google just introduced presentations to Google Docs, an online feature designed to rival Office PowerPoint. But this is not the end for the Redmond company, as Office's situation is bound to get worse. IBM also announced that, starting today, its Lotus Symphony office software will go head to head against both Microsoft's Office line-up and OpenOffice. Via the IBM Lotus Symphony, users will be able to access free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

Lotus Symphony essentially consists of free alternatives to the Redmond company's mainstay Office solutions: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. And while OpenOffice has made headways against Microsoft, Lotus Symphony will have IBM backing, funding, servicing and branding. In this context, Lotus Symphony might grow to take a consistent slice of the desktop productivity solutions market currently dominated by the Office suite. Additionally, as it is also based on the Open Document ISO standard, the free Lotus Symphony offerings can establish themselves as a rival to the also free open source OpenOffice.

"IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," said Steve Mills, senior vice president, IBM Software Group. "The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. When those documents are based on proprietary software, only future versions of the same software will be able to access that intelligence. This dynamic forces companies to keep paying license and maintenance fees to the same vendor for a basic commodity."

Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations come with support for both Windows and Linux operating systems. In this regard, one of the caveats of Lotus Symphony is the fact that it is designed only for Windows XP. Lacking support for Windows Vista might prove a shortcoming in the long run. Still, with Vista currently at just 6% of the market, IBM can afford to ignore Microsoft's latest operating system and focus on the big dog: XP.

"Now businesses can unlock their critical office information free of the costs and controls of any vendor." Mills added, "It's not about the document on the desktop anymore. It's all about making information universally accessible and putting it to work on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways."

IBM Lotus Symphony can be downloaded from here.