The VAR Guy

Stuart Crawford, a long-time IT consultant who is fluent in all things Microsoft, claims OpenOffice isn’t ready for business. The VAR Guy agrees with many of Crawford’s points — but our resident blogger sees a bigger problem with OpenOffice that Crawford failed to mention.

At first glance, Google Apps and Microsoft are the horses to beat in the online software suite race. But The VAR Guy remains preoccupied with a dark horse called Zoho, which just launched Writer 2.0 and continues to gain moment across multiple software as a service (SaaS) fronts.

Is IBM gearing up to disrupt Microsoft Office? Apparently so. In fact, Big Blue is bringing Lotus Symphony 1.2 — an open source application suite — to the Mac. (Lotus Symphony already runs on Linux and Windows.) And IBM is recruiting channel partners to back Symphony. Here’s the scoop.