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30,000 IBM employees have recently finished moving to Symphony, which is a version of OpenOffice, rather than Microsoft Office. 330,000 IBM employees already had been using Symphony, which brings the total users up to 360,000. This movement is obviously a digital tipping point, because Big Blue still makes a huge impact on the software world, and its move proves that OpenOffice is ready for prime time. Please click on the Read More link below to read the rest of the story.

Equally important in this news is the fact that IBM's move shows its commitment to the DDF Free software specification upon which OpenOffice / Symphony. ODF, the Open Document Format, is a standard which can be used by any company to create office productivity software. National, regional and municipal governments around the world care as much, and maybe more, about using public standards as they do about which products they choose. So IBM's move is a signal to governments around the world that one of the earth's largest technology companies is supporting the foundation upon which OpenOffice is based. That confidence is likely to increase the global adoption of OpenOffice, and erode government use of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft has tried to advance its own standard, called OOXML, but that standard has not found widespread adoption.

Here's the big picture: IBM's announcement means that the world can expect to see more competition in the desktop office productivity industry, which means more choice and lower prices for consumers.