Big news from IBM. They announced yesterday that they’re introducing Lotus Symphony again. Naturally this has rocked the IT world to its foundations. It’s like that scene in Rocky V when Rocky gets fed up with that young punk Tommy Morrison mouthing off about him, and comes out swinging. The Original Borg is going after the Borg. Man oh man. And this isn’t some new untested software. This is Lotus, baby. And it’s ODF compliant. Jesus. Devastating.

You can see one of many stories about it here. Best part comes toward the end:

It was all a very earnest effort from a company that’s tried to unseat Microsoft as the dominate [sic] player in enterprise software for years. During the press conference, one reporter asked why it sounded like he’d heard all of this from IBM Lotus before. IBM senior vice president Steve Mills fielded that question. “It’s no secret that anything you do is based on what you’ve tried to do in the past with varying degrees of success.”

We got swamped with calls yesterday because people view this new Lotus Symphony suite as a threat not only to Microsoft Office but also to our iWork ’08 suite of desktop productivity apps. Our official version is that we welcome IBM into the market and we think this will serve to further validate the office productivity market space. Secretly, however, we are freaking the hell out. There’s a huge threat of collateral damage as these two titans go to war. (Photo: Gareth Keenan, Lotus Magazine.)