Check this out -> Linux Magazine
Another small victory for Open Source altho it is their own product 
That sounds nice, but I have doubts about the veracity of the article in some respects, especially as it seems to be repeating second hand news. The original German article makes no mention of a 10 day deadline that I can see. One has to be careful about sloppy journalism whatever the source.
Hmm…
I’m not sure what I think of that. I can see very good reasons for forcing your employees to use open formats, but I don’t like the idea of forcing them to use your own software - it smacks of lack of faith in it, and seems to commit the very sins of distortion of free decision that people hate Microsoft for in the first place.
I guess you can fight fire with fire, and I guess they could make the case that by forcing their employees to use it, it will rapidly improve (who better to report bugs?), but still… if you’ve got a few bob lying around (IBM aren’t who they used to be - but they’re no upstart either), then just stump up the development, make it work so people want to use it…
Heck, you could offer cash incentives to all staff that submit patches or report legitimate bugs / well thought out wishlist items…
That’d get 'em using it (and make it work!)…
ETA - re patches, I didn’t actually realise it wasn’t open source. But there are reports they’re intending to incorporate later open office code into it. That must mean they’re opening the source, no?
It doesn’t sound like IBM which generally works over long timescales. From some recent figures, I understand that only about 7% of their desktops run Linux - but of course this could simply mean they are not ‘upgrading’ to MS Office 2007 on any desktop.