Who Needs Microsoft??
ByLast week, IBM launched Lotus Symphony, yet another free office application suite of products. Symphony consists of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software that is downloaded and resides on the user’s desktop. This is a definite advantage over Google Apps and Think Free. I like to be able to bring up a document or work on a presentation without having to be on-line. IBM’s product is fully supporting of the Open Document Format (ODF).
Existing Microsoft documents can be imported and revised with the Symphony products. Documents can be saved in other formats, including pdf. You can read about it here: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa
Feel free to take the video tour of the products. I did a partial tour of the presentation software and I could definitely feel the influence of “big blue”. The home page is spiffier than I had expected, but when I clicked into the download section, the colors were blue and IBM-ish – very buttoned down — totally different from the Google video I perused the week before! I’m not saying it’s bad or good — just different!
For you Linux users out there, there is a version of Symphony just for you – check it out! Plans are in the works to include Mac users in the future. All products are currently in beta and IBM has set up support forums, but no real support right now. I found that Ed Brill has been blogging on this regularly and you can see many user comments here: www.edbrill.com. Maybe some day IBM will add calendaring and contacts to their suite of products.
With all these choices, who needs Microsoft any more? If one of these free or low cost alternative application software companies can get some of the large corporations using these products, perhaps an impact can be made!
ibm.com/lotus/symphony
