Lining Up to Take on Microsoft

Mozilla Targets Email
The Open Road
Mozilla has announced that its email application Thunderbird will break out into a separate subsidiary with $3 million in seed funding. Thunderbird will attempt to foster the same type of open source development community that previously developed Firefox in order to build an email client and communications tool that can compete with Microsoft Outlook. Matt Asay is applauding the news, suggesting that Outlook has done very little over the last ten years to improve the email experience. "We've long needed real competition in the email market, given how much time people spend in email... This is a Very Good Thing."

IBM Takes on Microsoft Office
Between the Lines
IBM has just unveiled Lotus Symphony, an open source productivity suite designed to compete directly with Microsoft Office. Initially, Lotus Symphony will include software for spreadsheets, word processing, and presentations, but no email client. The suite will be freely available, and IBM will hope to monetize the offering with support contracts for larger companies. Dan Farber is clearly intrigued, but suspects that the ambitious project will ultimately fail to seriously challenge Microsoft. “Lotus Symphony is likely to meet the same fate as the ill-fated OS/2 and Lotus SmartSuite, the operating system IBM and productivity suite created in the 1990’s to topple Windows.”

The New York Times is Freed
BuzzMachine
The New York Times has announced the end of TimesSelect, the paper’s two year old subscription program. As a result, articles will be freely available and the paper will pass on $10 million in subscription revenue in favor of a rapidly growing advertising market. Jeff Jarvis argues that this is an overdue move that represents the end of paid content. “It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.”