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IBM has decided to play in the free productivity suite market with a reincarnation of its Symphony brand, for a collection of Lotus Notes 8 editors under that name.

IBM Plays Symphony, One-Ups Microsoft

IBM Lotus executive Ed Brill noted how the Symphony name is a classic one, and using it for this new offering is "a very strong label for describing the current and future intent from IBM Lotus around these editors."

The Lotus Symphony tools for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations form the suite. It is freely available for Microsoft and Linux platforms, with Apple support planned for an undetermined future release.

Symphony can handle the typical Microsoft formats seen in millions of documents. It supports exporting documents as PDF files. Also, Symphony opens documents created in the Open Document Format found in OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Brill also said the Symphony debut "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."

For techies whose experience in IT doesn't date back to the age of the dinosaurs, like ENIAC, Wikipedia can get you up to speed on the history of the Symphony name.