On the heels of last week’s announcement that it’s joining the OpenOffice community, IBM today announced the launch of IBM Lotus Symphony, a free desktop application suite, reports The New York Times. 

According to the report, Lotus Symphony consists of three free programs — word processing, spreadsheets and presentations –- and will compete directly with Microsoft Office.  

The Times continues: 

IBM’s Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft’s mainstay Office programs — Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker… 

IBM executives compare this move with the push it gave Linux, the open-source operating system, into corporate data centers. In 2000, IBM declared that it would forcefully back Linux with its engineers, its marketing and its dollars. The support from IBM helped make Linux a mainstream technology in corporations, where it competes with Microsoft’s Windows server software. 

CNET News also has a good report on the Symphony announcement, while IBM executive Ed Brill writes today on his blog: 

I’m excited about this announcement on many levels. First, it shows the strategic nature, based on current and future plans, of IBM’s investment in delivering the editors in Notes 8 as well as through other channels.  Second, it offers something from the Lotus brand focused on the end-user/consumer. Third, it demonstrates the strength of IBM’s commitment behind desktop alternatives (Linux, ODF, etc) to the broader market — which should help with all distributions of OpenOffice.org-based editor tools, today and tomorrow. 

In the name of self-promotion, to get the full story on IBM’s decision to join OpenOffice and its implications for the open document format, check out this article I wrote on the topic last week.