IBM rolls out Lotus Symphony. Will the reaction be forte or pianissimo?

Tired of playing Salieri to Microsoft’s Mozart in the office suite area, IBM has been making a few aggressive moves into this market as of late.
The company recently decided to back open-source Office competitor, OpenOffice.org, dedicating engineers to working on the OpenOffice project – much as they dedicated engineers to working on Linux years ago. This is beneficial to OpenOffice.org if only because many of the features that OpenOffice.org have not yet implemented have already been solved with IBM’s relatively less successful Lotus suite – from access to the visually impaired.
Of course, the move to back OO.o is a major turnaround from IBM’s policy 18 months ago, when they said they had no plans to contribute to OO.o.
This shift in strategy is perhaps a response to Microsoft’s aggressive stance towards making its OOXML document format a standard, (recently rejected,) as a way to enforce vendor lock-in. Recently, IBM announced combined OpenOffice and their in-house “Eclipse”, called it “Lotus Symphony” and is now offering the Beta free for SuSE, Red Hat, and Windows users – with the main selling point being that there’s no vendor lock-in with the Symphony product.
From the Symphony.lotus.com Web site:
How is Lotus Symphony different?
You’re in charge! Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard-which means you’re not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Finally, free tools and freedom of choice!
For the end-user in a corporate environment, the big deal is that IBM, unlike the OO.o team, can offer support and services for Symphony rollouts and maintenance. That may be music to the ears of those pushing for adoption of open-source application suites in their own companies to save costs, who can now justify that they will be able to get support for those same applications.
Once they do so, IBM can then turn around and sell them the not-so-free Outlook/Exchange competitors, Lotus Notes and the associated backend products. Irwin Lazar at Collaboration Loop points out this is a similar strategy to Apple using the iPod to drive Mac computer sales.
Those interested in finding out more about Symphony can take a look at ZDNet’s review of the Symphony suite.