In their victory dance, the EU said they are now considering investigating Microsoft's dominance in the Of"ce applications market. A few hours later, Google announced 'Google Presentations', completing the trinity of free online of"ce applications that directly compete with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and now Microsoft Powerpoint. A day later and IBM announced they are giving away their own version of Microsoft Of"ce called Lotus Symphony. It seems that Microsoft is suddenly "nding itself with a lot of competition in the business desktop applications market where they have been king since day one. Many are saying all these moves are an all-out attack on Microsoft's biggest earner but is the IBM move a go at Microsoft or is it actually a go at at Google?

Microsoft Of"ce has been around for decades and has been all but dominant during this time. IBM made some inroads with their Lotus software yet this week they decided to give their of"ce productivity suite away for free when they could have done this a decade ago. While IBM have done immense work with the open source community over the last few years by working with open standards and contributing to many open source projects, was the in"uence strong enough that IBM decided to give their software away for free or was it Google's move into enterprise software? Google's deal last week with Capgemini must have been seen as a shot across the bow of those companies selling enterprise software. The Capgemini agreement will see them partner with Google to resell 'Google Apps Premier Edition', this is a bundle of Google's Of"ce Clone, Google Calendar, the Google instant messaging client, the Google VoIP service and the Google mail service which will allow companies to move their mail system onto GMail while maintaining all their email and email addresses. Capgemini will also make additional money by charging to integrate Google Apps into these enterprises.

So far it has been colleges that signed up for the Google Apps service but it is going to be a much harder sell to entice investment banks and enterprises worried about data privacy to now move their of"ce applications and email over to Google servers outside of their insanely paranoid "rewalls and security rules. For enterprises they will be wary of their email being stored on servers outside of their control and even outside local data privacy laws. Industrial espionage is a big business and most larger enterprises are well aware of the threat of competitors "nding out what they are doing. IBM with their almost century of experience dealing with businesses will know this, so offering businesses an alternative to both Microsoft Of"ce and Google Documents might just grab the business of those enticed by the Google offering but who worry about moving data away from their own physical control.

The Lotus Symphony tools from IBM fully support Microsoft Of"ce formats as well as the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and in addition can directly be integrated with enterprise applications from IBM and others, allowing anyone to plug directly into existing services inside a company.

IBM's timing on this has been either lucky or impeccable, Google got the market talking about Of"ce alternatives and IBM have moved in to show off a more secure and robust alternative to Microsoft and Google.

IBM, famed for building computers to beat chess players has made a nice move here, though it is far from checkmate for Microsoft or Google.