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All the entries posted on September 18, 2007.
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Home > Plugged In > Archives > 2007 > September > 18
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
IBM launches Microsoft Office challenger
Big Blue has unveiled a free software suite meant to take on Microsoft Office.
IBM’s Lotus Symphony package includes software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. It works with Windows and Linux operating systems and supports Microsoft Office formats.
Analysts say the package is a big opportunity for IBM, although Microsoft likely has nothing to fear anytime soon.
Symphony is based on software from OpenOffice.org, the project that provides the foundation for Google’s desktop suite and Sun Microsystems’ Star Office. IBM said last week it would formally join OpenOffice.org.
(Lotus Symphony icon: IBM)
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Live from Intel’s developer forum
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the integrated circuit icon whose vaunted “Moore’s Law” has long outlined the expected pace of technology innovations, just left the stage here at Intel’s developer forum.
Moore lives up to his reputation as mild-mannered and grandfatherly. But the elder statesman of the technology industry also showed everyone here that he hasn’t missed a lick.
In a casual Q-and-A with Moira Gunn, host of NPR’s “TechNation” program, Moore talked as fluently about bipolar transistors and hafnium-based gate technology as he did about fishing.
He also gave some interesting insights into Intel that most people might not know. The company had to buy rights to the name, for instance, from a Midwestern motel owner, Moore explained. And Intel pioneered the less-than-scientific design of office cubicles, he said, only because putting offices into one of its early, windowless buildings in Silicon Valley would have made the place “look like a prison block,” he said. Moore still has the biggest cubicle at Intel’s headquarters, he added - at least in part because he refused to get rid of a big round table that wouldn’t fit in a typical-sized cubicle.
Asked what he might do today if he didn’t help invent the semiconductor industry, Moore said he’d probably get into bioscience industry. But he also said he has no regrets about getting into the integrated circuits business when he did.
“Obviously it’s affected me financially,” he said as the crowd laughed. But it hasn’t affected him in other ways, he added, saying “I’ve still got the same wife.”
Intel Corp. CEO Paul Oellini is still on the stage here in San Francisco at the Intel Developer Forum, but already he has showed off what he says is the world’s first 32-nanometer semiconductors and promised to reduce the size of a microprocessor chip set by 60 percent in the next few years, paving the way for yet even smaller and more powerful electronics.
Otellini also reaffirmed Intel’s planned rollout of future chips, something that’s key for computer and mobile device builders. He said production is going smoothly and the company is well on its way to delivering its next major chip line, called Penryn, on Nov. 12 for severs and high-end desktops and in the first quarter of 2008 for mobile devices and other applications. In the second half of 2008, Intel will start shipping Nehalem, its next chip line, he said.
Otellini also just announced that Intel is making a major investment in Japan to make the next generation of Wi-Fi, called Wi-Max, more mainstream. He just announced that several major computer makers — including Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer and Panasonic — have committed to intengrating Wi-Max chips into their laptops.
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