IBM is challenging Microsoft with a game of "anything you can do I can do." <A HREF="http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/12/a-first-look-at-IBMs-Symphony-office-suite_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/12/a-first-look-at-IBMs-Symphony-office-suite_1.html">Its new Lotus Symphony office suite</A>--now available as a public beta--does much of what the $400 Standard edition of Microsoft Office does, only at a much better price: It's free.

Comprised of three applications--a word processor (Lotus Symphony Documents), a spreadsheet (Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets), and a presentation creator (Lotus Symphony Presentations)--Symphony supports both Windows (XP, Vista, 2000) and Linux operating systems. (IBM says a version for the Mac OS is coming, but it hasn't said when.) Each app can open and save in a variety of file formats, including Office (2003/XP/97; not 2007) and ODF (Open Document Format), as well as save files as PDFs. It requires a minimum of 540MB of hard disk space on Windows (750MB on Linux) and 512MB of RAM.