The Wall Street Journal reports IBM is set to offer Symphony, a business software suite, free of charge from Tuesday, via download, or with purchase of its Notes collaboration software ($145/user). The IBM giveaway, which includes a word processor, collaboration, spreadsheet and presentation applications, will compete against Microsoft's Office suite. IBM is attempting to further promote its Notes software (alternative to Outlook) and its international standard "Open Document Format" as a free alternative to MS Office. 
Symphony is based on software available from OpenOffice.org, which IBM recently said it would join. IBM software chief Steve Mills concedes, "something we deliver for free won't be a moneymaker," but adds that corporate customers offering Symphony to some employees might free up budgets to buy other IBM software. Mills also says he expects IBM will continue to buy new versions of MS Office, since it has a lot of features not available with Open Office. However, Mills says not everyone needs the fancy features, in which case, Notes will suffice and upgrades to Office 7.0 are unnecessary. Notes has 135 million worldwide users. Shares of IBM fell 0.5% to $114.52 on Monday.
Sources: Wall Street Journal
Commentary: Microsoft's Open Office Setback: GOOG, IBM and SUNW to Benefit? • Yahoo! Beefs Up Email with $350M Zimbra Acquisition • Safety in Tech? You Betcha -- Barron's
Stocks/ETFs to watch: IBM, MSFT, GOOG, JAVA
Earnings call transcript: International Business Machines Q2 2007, Microsoft F4Q07, Google Q2 2007
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