IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite

BBCWatcher writes "Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to announce a free, downloadable office suite today in a direct challenge to Microsoft. The news comes only a week after IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project. IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely."

Comments

great!

[FudRucker]

Kudos to IBM, much appreciated, thanks :)

Re:great!

[ToasterofDOOM]

Yeah, maybe it'll eventually become decent software! Not a troll: I use OOo when I'm on windows, but it's really subpar, especially on performance. It has some neat features, and it's more than enough for casual home/school use, but it really needs some work done.

Re:great!

[bheer]

I look forward to trying it out, but my first look at the website wasn't encouraging.

Have you seen the minimum system requirements for the beta? 1GB RAM minimum (the same, IIRC, as Lotus Notes 8 -- probably because they use some of the same UI framework.) This is when I can run MS Office 2007 on a 256MB RAM machine (and it runs well too as long as I don't run other apps).

Re:great!

[Malevolyn]

Interestingly enough, I attempted to visit the Open Office site after reading this article and it was down. Hmm...

Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses. its joining the open office movement have made the movement pass the critical mass. now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[SCHecklerX]

And since IBM isn't really in the PC operating system business any more, they aren't abusing a monopoly position to do this. This is a beautiful move by IBM.

There's still a long way to go to bring back open standards and real competition, but whittling away at the office suite is a good start.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[PunkOfLinux]

Did anyone else notice the lack the mention of Openoffice in the actual article?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[fermion]

Probably not. IBM provides solutions. The problem was that thier solutions were expensive. MS response was to allow businesses to buy cheap hardware, buy at the time not extravagantly priced OS, and then use whatever IT support one can afford. This allowed firms that previously could not afford an IT solution to have at least a facade of one. Of course reliability and effeciency was often much less, but of course so was cost.

Recall that Sun also tried this office competition, and tied it to a system that would allow firms to have predictable office application costs. It did not seem to work so well.

My suspicion is that firms like the flexibility that the MS solution provides. Computers will work well enough with almost no support(I have seen no MS shop staff support at adequate numbers to keep the machines running), and the support personal are usually semi-skilled so if they complain about over work, they are easily replaced. Combine this with the fact that the MS Office suite is often in a web of legal limitations, and I can't see that this IBM offering is any better than anyone else. Perhaps existing *nix users will gravitate toward the IBM name, but I doubt others will.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future. Which is a shame because the latest version of Open Office Calc is inferior to Excel 2003 (as I said here). I hope that IBM's support for OOo can make it a better program so that it quickly surpasses the old "de facto office suite" in functionality and use.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

Let me put it this way,

in the past, ibm was for big business. ms was medium and small businesses' friend.

with this move, ibm, who is still the friend of the big businesses is pushing forward something that is more flexible and cheap - open office. it is free and it is going to get so much flexibility with modules, 3rd party apps and so that its going to be a blast of flexibility.

many big businesses happily using something that is free and they can control means that any small to medium businesses doing business with them will feel compelled, even felt necessary to use the same suite in regard to ease and compatibility.

then, so long microsoft, in regard to office suite.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Gr8Apes]

My suspicion is that firms like the flexibility that the MS solution provides. Computers will work well enough with almost no support(I have seen no MS shop staff support at adequate numbers to keep the machines running), and the support personal are usually semi-skilled so if they complain about over work, they are easily replaced. And those are the reasons why most MS shops are riddled with spyware, adware, viruses, etc.

Lots of people think they're capable of supporting MS software just like lots of lemmings believe they can walk on air....

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Renegade88]

I use Calc at least casually and I prefer it to Excel, of which I consider myself an expert. I didn't get your "cut and paste" example at all. Calc pastes data exactly where you say and you're upset because it overwrites data that you left in the target area? What? So thanks for your opinion, mine differs.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

Yea, I would much rather become IBMs bitch than MS bitch... or not. Just ignore IBMs absurd pricing, neglect of Lotus Notes (where is the Linux client???), massive lay-offs replacing workers with H1-Bs and offshoring, etc... Yea, bunch of fucking saints over at IBM, until you have to do business with them.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

Open a spreadsheet in Excel and label 6 cells from A1-A6. Now select row 5 right click and select cut. Select row 1 and right click and select "Insert Cut Cells." You still have 5 labelled cells, the order they're in is simply different. Now trying doing this very basic activity in Calc and see if you get the same results. Nope, you don't.

I'd say Calc is the inferior product in being unable to perform this very basic activity.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.

I'm not sure how you can support that claim. Pretty much all businesses today are heavily reliant on Windows and Office. I suspect a rather small proportion of all businesses use IBM kit, and I suspect that nearly all of those that do are medium-sized or large businesses, not the small businesses that drive economies.

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

Sure they are. Also, this is the year of Linux on the desktop and Firefox will have a majority share of the browser market by 2008.

The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office. If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine. But it lacks the power, usability and feature completeness of MS Office. Pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking by OSS fans, as is pretending businesses are going to change their office suite just to avoid spending a few dollars per employee on a more productive tool.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Vanders]

I'm with the poster above: what?

"I cut and paste entire columns on a regular basis and Excel actually removes those columns and pastes the columns where I tell it to. Calc on the other hand simply cuts the data out and places the data where I tell it to, overwriting whatever data was originally there."

So let's just get this straight:

• Excel: Removes ("Cuts") the column and then pastes ("Places") it "where I tell it to"
• Calc: Cuts ("Removes") the data and places ("Pastes") it "where I tell it to"

Man, that's shocking: both Excel and Calc do the same thing. I can see how that might be confusing.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[mh1997]

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

As long as most contracts from the Federal Government (USA) require electronic deliveries in MS Office format (companies buy MS products to ensure compatibility, they can't risk a document not opening properly), and the Government requires computers, networks, email, etc. to be MS products, MS will do just fine.

Most of those contractors and federal employees will use MS office and other MS products at home because it is what they are familiar with at work. Their kids will use MS Office, and their schools will also - because it is familiar.

Sure there might be a lawsuit here and there when MS forgets to pay their congressman/senator, but as long as the DOJ uses MS products while suing MS for monopolistic practices, buisiness will continue as usual at MS.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

As I said to the above poster here's an example that illustrates my point clearer (requires Excel and OOo).

Open a spreadsheet in Excel and label 6 cells from A1-A6. Now select row 5 right click and select cut. Select row 1 and right click and select "Insert Cut Cells." You still have 6 labelled cells, the order they're in is simply different. Now trying doing this very basic activity in Calc and see if you get the same results. Nope, you don't.

I'd say Calc is the inferior product in being unable to perform this very basic activity.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[word munger]

Hmmm... I've been using excel for years and I've never had occasion to use that feature. You're basing your entire evaluation of a product on one rarely-used feature? Personally I'd like to be able to change the default graph style in excel. Can't do that either, but you don't see me screaming for the exits.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[betterunixthanunix]

"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."

People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not. But I can think of a few things that OOo has that MS Office does not. People who have trouble with OOo seem to be people who were originally trained with MS Office, and so it should come as no surprise that they are having trouble. Yes, things are in different places. Yes, things have different names.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

As I said in my original post on the other article its a feature I use on a pretty regular basis, so its not rarely used for me.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[visualight]

I don't have MS Office, but to do what I think you want in OO you select row 5, cut, select row 1, insert column, select the inserted column and paste. OO does not have this "Insert Cut Cells" you mention.

So what you're saying is, in this specific task OO requires two steps and MS Office requires one. I suppose if I cared I could find a few tasks that OO can do in one step that MS Office needs two to accomplish.

They're different products, you must know there will be some differences in the interface(s).

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

In OO Calc, instead of 'Insert Cut Cells' you have to select 'Paste special...' and 'Shift Cells'...

If your employees are too stupid to figure this out, they you deserve to pay the Microsoft Office tax.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Vanders]

Yes, you replied just as I was posting myself. Anyway:

• Excel: You get a column of cells, in my case "Five, One, Two, Three, Four, Six"
• Calc: You get a column of cells, in my case "Five, Two, Three, Four, [Blank], Six"
• 
  No surprises there though. In Excel you select "Insert Cut Cells", in Calc you select "Paste". I wonder what happens if you select "Paste" in Excel instead of "Insert Cut Cells"?
  
  • You get a column of cells, in my case "Five, Two, Three, Four, [Blank], Six"
  Another non-surprise. If you select the same function in both Excel and Calc, you get the same result.
  
  Your complaint is no more than "The context menu in Calc does not contain an 'Insert Cut Cells' item".

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[betterunixthanunix]

Hmm...I sense two options for you:

1. Record a little macro or write a quick little script (the operations you need are: copy, insert, paste, delete).
2. Write to the OOo developers

The beauty of option #2 is that it is open source, and the developers actually care about what you have to say (most of the time).

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

"require electronic deliveries in MS Office format"
Not quite. Use PDF.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Idaho]

Open a spreadsheet in Excel and label 6 cells from A1-A6. Now select row 5 right click and select cut. Select row 1 and right click and select "Insert Cut Cells." You still have 5 labelled cells, the order they're in is simply different. Now trying doing this very basic activity in Calc and see if you get the same results. Nope, you don't.

Goodness my...instead you have to select 'Insert', press enter to select the default option to move the other cells down 9i.e. insert a row), and paste the cell you just cut. Involves 1 extra mouse click/key-press, in exchange for a simpler right-click menu.

Yes, I would certainly call that a showstopper bug, uhhhuhhh.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[speaker of the truth]

Well the beauty of bitching publicly is that someone gets to show you a solution. Thanks, I'll resume testing OOo now :)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[myxiplx]

So you're complaining about a different product, just for being a different product? It's not that you can't do your job with it, just that it means learning a slightly different way to do it?

Do you also complain about people fitting different handles to their doors? I bet differing brands of kettles or washing machines are a constant nightmare for you, and for the love of god don't try to drive abroad, I think the shock could kill you.

Getting back on topic, it's a different program, you have to expect a few differences. The fact that it uses a properly documented format, with correct math is far more important imo.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[everphilski]

OK mr. Self-Proclaimed-Excel-Expert, please explain how to chart the following in OO.org, on the same graph.

x1 y1 x2 y2
01 01 01 01
02 03 05 11
03 05 07 21
04 07
05 09
06 11
07 13


Fact of the matter is (as of 6 months ago at least, last I tried) you can't - you need to share the same abscissa for each data series plotted on a chart. But if I'm looking at outputs from a simulation at varying data rates, I can't go in by hand and insert fake interpolated data points ... it's time consuming. And why should I, when Excel will do multiple independant series?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

People keep saying this, but not backing it up.

I've backed it up, in great detail and with many objective examples of features and specific bugs, in multiple previous posts. I didn't see the point in repeating all of that here, but please do Google my posting history (search for things like Writer and Word) if you're interested.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo.

I respectfully disagree. While I really am grateful to the OpenOffice guys for giving me a basic office suite I can use for free at home, I think OO is damaging in the long run, because (a) it insists on trying to be a Word clone, and (b) it sucks up most of the community volunteers, commercial resources and publicity that could otherwise be used to work on a better alternative.

No-one in Windows world has yet produced a really good tool for writers who want to produce beautiful documents efficiently, nor a really easy-to-use spreadsheet that still supports powerful data analysis and well-presented graphs, nor a presentation package that actually supports making good presentations rather than bullet-laden monstrosities, nor for that matter a good PIM that supports serious corporate infrastructure but still provides good e-mail, scheduling, etc. There is huge demand for these things, but since no-one is currently doing them (in part because they're all working on Office, OpenOffice, and various other less good versions of the same things, I presume) the market doesn't even realise what it's missing.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[NoOneInParticular]

Okay, cut, insert, and paste does the trick. Excel has a menu item for this doing the insert and the paste in one go. What's the big deal? If you really want to, you can add it as a macro.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

Right off the bat, doesn't the OO spreadsheet have a record limitation that's only around 30K, rather than 62K for MS Office 2003, and practically limitless in Office XP? That's a deal-killer right there for many business analysts.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[mhall119]

That's not a lacking in feature, it's a difference in workflow. You can't say that a product is objectively inferior simply because the process of accomplishing the same task is different.

Here is something to keep in mind when using Calc, it treats operations as operations on data, not locations. In Excel, when you "cut" a row, it cuts the row itself. That is why Excel will copy the data to the clipboard and delete the row and shift others up. In Calc, when you "cut" a row, it cuts the data in that row. That is why Calc will copy the data to the clipboard and only clear the row, not deleting it and shifting others up. That is also why in order to "Insert Cut Cells" in Calc, you first have to insert a row, then paste your "cut" data into it.

So to accomplish your task, this is the process in Calc: Select row 5, right-click and select cut, right-click and select "Delete row". Select row 1 and right-click and select "Insert row", right-click and select "Paste". Sure the process is different, and in this case twice as long, but that just makes Calc "different", not "inferior". If you find yourself performing this task so often that it makes Calc "inferior" in your mind, you probably need to rethink your workflow, or if a spreadsheet is really the appropriate tool for what you are trying to do.

Followup: If you are like me and hate using context (right-click) menus for these simple things, in Calc you can go to Tools->Customize to set keyboard shortcuts. I have set Ctrl+Delete to "Delete Cells" and Ctrl+Insert to "Insert Cells Down". This makes your process: Select row 5, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+Delete. Select row 1, Ctrl+Insert, Ctrl+v. I haven't found a way to modify keyboard shortcuts in Excel.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[dylan_-]

Fact of the matter is (as of 6 months ago at least, last I tried) you can't - you need to share the same abscissa for each data series plotted on a chart.

Well, I'll take your word for it you couldn't do this, as I'm not going to downgrade and check, but unless I'm misunderstanding the problem, OOo 2.3 handles this just fine (was only released recently, so you probably tried 2.2).

Actually, they seem to have totally updated the graphing tool. I'm sure it didn't used to update the actual graph in real-time as you changed options. You might want to have another look and see if it's fixed your previous complaints.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[WhiteWolf666]

I do not believe so.

I put together some rather monster spreadsheets with database sources for some sample analysis last year.

I'm not sure exactly how many records we used, but I believe it was in the 6 figure range. It was most certainly no less than 100 k, and I did it all using OO.org Base(with MySQL) / OO.org Spreadsheet.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[WhiteWolf666]

lol I love it :)

Slashdot doesn't make me giggle out loud very often :) :) :)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

at least ibm doesnt try to wrest control of MY pc at my OWN home/office out of my hands. thats what i care about.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

I'm not sure how you can support that claim. Pretty much all businesses today are heavily reliant on Windows and Office. I suspect a rather small proportion of all businesses use IBM kit, and I suspect that nearly all of those that do are medium-sized or large businesses, not the small businesses that drive economies.

being reliant and choosing are 2 different things. they are reliant on ms stuff because it was the only source that seemed to be reliable enough and offered solutions.

now ibm is in the market. ibm is much older and bigger than microsoft. therefore much more reliable as per its history. businesses may hesitate about linux, open source, but when sources like ibm back them its a whole different story.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Bert64]

The row limit is 65535, and excel has the same limitation i believe.
OO is in an unfortunate position that, if they were to have a higher limit, people would use the extra cells and then try to save their files in ms formats, resulting in them not loading. And this would be blamed in OO for having poor compatibility, rather than MS for having the 65535 rows limit.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

it will change. remember, ibm is a major company that provides solutions to many governments.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

instead you have to select 'Insert', press enter to select the default option to move the other cells down 9i.e. insert a row), and paste the cell you just cut

Does what you're describing actually work for you? If so, what version of OO.o are you running?

I couldn't believe that what the grandparent said was correct, so I tried it for myself. I'm running OO.o 2.3.0, and the option to shift down is grayed out on a Cut operation. It's there for Copy, but not for Cut. Even if I could shift down on the "Paste Special" operation, it appears that a blank line will be left behind in the 5th row.

I'd like to be able to use OO.o instead of Excel, but the fact that it's not obvious how to do a simple reordering of rows is pretty bad.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[seasunset]

I am guessing that you either did business with IBM a long time ago or that you really don't know what you are talking about.

Currently, most IBM solutions are fairly open. This up to their mainframe offer where you can install a very standard Linux distro (mainly SuSE, but also Red Hat or Debian).

Most of their frameworks (like application servers) are standard based. Sometimes they suck from a technical point of view, but from an openness perspective they are more than OK.

Yes, 10 years ago IBM was really bad (TM) with regards to lock in. Not anymore from my experience.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[everphilski]

I think it was 2.2 last time I tried. If so, that's cool, but we needed it 6 months ago :) instead we installed VMware/Windows XP/Office and use that for simple data analysis on our Linux workstations.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Wylfing]

The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office.

So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project? I would guess that instead of picking their noses, they'll be closing any feature gaps that exist.

If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine.

Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.

It's the higher-end functionality, where e.g. a business builds an "application" on top of Excel, that OOo needs to catch up, but this is by no means the mainstream use of Office.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project?

No, I just don't give credit until the results justify it. The 100 or so developers who have been working on OO via Sun haven't worked miracles in several years; why would we expect a few more to change things overnight?

Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.

On the contrary. It's giving them what they expect right now. There is no doubt that the majority of users will follow where the software leads them. There is also no doubt that there are substantial cost savings to be made from better manipulation of these documents and presentation of the data in them. But until the software leads the user to do things in these better ways, we'll be stuck with the sort of horrendous presentations and awkward documents many of us have to work with every day.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[mhall119]

neglect of Lotus Notes (where is the Linux client???) Lotus Notes 8 has a Linux client. It's actually build on top of the open-source Eclipse platform.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[temcat]

I can back up this opinion as someone who deals with text processing 8 hours a day.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

And this is still not a full list. For example, one thing not mentioned there is that Word allows me to continue working while it autosaves. Writer does not, it just interrupts me suddenly and locks out of my work for this time. It wouldn't be a problem for me if saving were fast, but when the file in question is a moderately large DOC or RTF, saving may take several seconds. That annoys the hell out of me.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sydb]

user inserts rows

Warning!

If you add more rows you will not be able to share this spreadsheet with Microsoft Excel users, as Microsoft Excel does not support more than 65,535 rows.

Would you like to continue adding rows? [yes] [no] [ ]don't ask this again.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[huckamania]

I just thought that meant they were going to stop using MS office products full time. Next they are going to add some secretaries and see how they like it. IBM always moves their developers over first. We'll know they are serious when the lawyers and accountants have to start using it.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[dokebi]

The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office.

I have mod points, but I'll bite and reply instead. No, the fundamental problem is not that OO.o isn't as good or not as MSO. The problem is it's always difficult to replace entrenched software, especially when the replacement can't handle old documents. Not only that, many businesses use MSO beyond just word processing and spreadsheets. With Visual Basic, many businesses use Excel as analysis and computational tool that is irreplaceable. They know they've made themselves dependent on MS, but now no longer have the choice to switch because so much of their revenue is dependent on it.

Hopefully IBM's developers understand this, and make MSO compatibility one of their priorities. A drop in replacement for visual basic and Excel, better .doc, .xl support, and a more polished presentation program.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

According to their online documentation, Calc has a limit of 32,000 rows per sheet. Is that out of date?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

It looks like the limit for Calc is indeed 32K, unless the documentation is obsolete.

I would have liked to use Calc for some of my blogwork (which entails spreadsheets of 70K+ records), but went with Office XP instead.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[haystor]

Lotus 1-2-3 used to have the capability to display a graph of a function. This seems to have disappeared from all spreadsheets. I used to graph functions as reference lines vs. data that I was gathering.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[gosand]

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.

But that can't just happen overnight. I have used Word/Excel/Powerpoint longer. At home, I have OO.o installed, and that is what I use. But for some reason, my resume (in Word) is mis-formatted in Writer. It takes up an additional page. I have messed with it and messed with it, and I can't get it to look quite right. I use Excel daily for work, and to be honest haven't really tried Calc. I don't do that many spreadsheets at home. Same goes for Impress.

I turned a friend onto OO.o a couple of years ago. He used it for about a year, then went back to Office. He said he gave it a shot, but just couldn't get comfortable with it. To me, that is an HONEST assessment. I don't buy the blanket argument that OO.o is "just as good". MS Office is the leader, they have to be knocked off... it has to be proven, most likely repeatedly, that OO.o is just as good if not better. Hopefully with someone like IBM behind it, it can get a foothold in the business world. You can reach a lot of people that way.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[CAIMLAS]

I'll back it up - and I not only hate MS Office and MS's behavior, but I have a philosophical fondness for open source. I have quite a few 'operational problems' and frustrations when I attempt to use the later versions of MSO; I cut my teeth on word processing with WP511, and then later with MSO 95/97. But it's still "better" (and I have similar 'problems' with OOo, too).

In my mind there are two, maybe three things which make MS Office simply "better" than OOo. And they're not simply features which MSO has that OOo doesn't. These differences are:

1) Simple document scrolling. If I have a 30 page document with images in it (or even without images, as is often the case) on a system with a 2Ghz processor and 512Mb+ RAM, hitting the 'page down' key should not result in a lengthy delay. Neither should I see "typing lag", even if I'm editing in the middle of a large document. OOo does all this (and more, including outright momentary and permanent freezes while editing), and I've only experienced brief freezes/lag while opening large MSO documents.
2) Stability and file support. I've lost close to 20 pages of (single spaced, fictional/creative) writing to OOo 2.x's ODF now, whether it's due to the program crashing while I'm working before a save, or the document getting corrupted on save/crash (likewise for the backup, in two instances). This is why I'll use the older 1.x OOo strain over 2.x if I'm going to use OOo.
3) It's slow. This pertains to the first two, but it does NOT feel like finessed code in the least bit! (largely a criticism of 2.x, again).

If IBM can help 'fix' the first two problems, they'll be well on their way to an 'enterprise' application - and they'll likely fix #3 simply in the process.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, Excel 2007's limit is 1 Million rows. Prior to that, the limit was 64K rows, OOo's limit is, IIRC, 32K rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[that IT girl]

The company I work for is a "business partner" with IBM. They've been pissing me off all over the place lately.
This move at least partially redeems them in my book.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Maxo-Texas]

I've never heard of the feature myself.

OOo does miss a lot of the little features like this which some people love and everyone else is ignorant of.

My personal cross was rectangular cut and paste which I and others have lobbied for about 3 years. It looks like it will be in 2.4. This is a key feature when manipulating log files.

I'm disappointed that IBM is doing this. I would have preferred that they focused on fixing Openoffice.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[wilsonthecat]

I don't know what you class by MS shops, but most I've worked for have virus scanners, all but port 80 locked down and most website blockers via proxies or similar. Perhaps this is just a perceived view of the business world from a small portion of /. readers who are yet to work in large firms (but mothers have got spyware and so make the link).

If this suite is to take off and compete as an office application for large firms it needs to have a licensing system that beats Microsoft's, be compatible with Word documents/and or exchange or MAPI. Atleast in the US and Europe.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anubis350]

Lemmings don't *think* they can walk on air, they *know* it the problem is, gravity doesn't agree with them (SAT time kids, lemmings::most MS techs as gravity::_______ ):-p

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Docs, IBM Docs and MS BoonDocs

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

Maybe because they're talking about Lotus Symphony?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

OOo 2.3 has 64K rows. I checked it yesterday.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

user inserts rows

Warning!

If you add more rows you will not be able to share this spreadsheet with Microsoft Excel users, as Microsoft Excel does not support more than 65,535 rows.

Would you like to continue adding rows? [yes] [no] [ ]don't ask this again. The yes/no option leads me to believe that it will in fact support more than 65,535 rows... It just will apparently lose support for an earlier version of Excel. Call me Captain Obvious, but I would say this means OOo supports more than 32,000 rows... unless clicking on the "yes" option returns a message box with the message "NO!" and then causes your hard drive to spin wildly and expload.

My question is, after you create your 32,001st row will it still support newer versions of office or does it alter the file type all together? What is the actual limit of OOo spreadsheets?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just "not as good"; it's horrible. I've been using it on and off since it was Star Office. The lack of progress is mind blogging. I'd love to have a low cost alternative to Office. OO ain't it.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

I'm guessing you haven't been near as AS/400 or DB2 support contract lately. Or tried to buy a replacement part and had your purchasing guy faint at the price. Just because they support open standards doesn't mean they don't put you over a different barrel.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[KiahZero]

Maybe NeoOffice is superior, but I don't have any of those problems with it.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[MadChicken]

Did anyone else notice the lack of a *link* in the actual article?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[msslc3]

Whaddya mean IBM isn't in the PC operating system business? OS/2 forever! A better DOS than DOS. A better Windows than Windows. I know that's true, because it comes from Big Blue.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Lotus Notes sucks...

Anyone else remember the old Lotus SmartSuite series of apps? Ami Pro?

And how much they sucked ass?

Woo on taking OpenOffice, putting a new face on it, and calling it a new suite.

This is non news except that it's IBMs name and not some single dev schmuck in the middle of the Ukraine, modding OO.

Snore.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[moeinvt]

"Yea, I would much rather become IBMs bitch than MS bitch... or not. Just ignore IBMs absurd pricing, . . ."

They're providing a FREE office suite, which doesn't exactly have an "absurd" price, and although I haven't downloaded it yet, I'll be surprised if the terms of use necessitate you becoming their bitch.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Odin_Tiger]

Better articles w/ links:
News.com
The Guardian (Blog)
CNN Money
ZDNET

And also, actual Lotus Symphony page on IBM's site, with download link.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Blakey Rat]

ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.

All sizes of businesses use Office and Windows. Virtually ALL businesses use Office and Windows. IBM has a stranglehold in some areas, for instance medical industries. That said, I haven't seen a small business anywhere using any IBM products other than perhaps Point Of Sale. For medium and large businesses, I would wager nearly all of them spend more money to Microsoft than they do to IBM. (And I bet they get a hell of a lot more Return of Investment from Microsoft products. The quality difference between, for example, Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes is staggering.)

its joining the open office movement have made the movement pass the critical mass.

Uh. Evidence? Reference? Link?

now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

Call me when I actually can walk into a randomly-selected office and have a chance of seeing a copy of OpenOffice running.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

of course all businesses use windows and office, and they will be using them still after the openoffice revolution.

we are a small software shop, yet we still use windows xp and office for this and that. you still have them handy in case compatibility requires them for any occasion.

its the general use that matters.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TrancePhreak]

"The beauty of option #2 is that it is open source, and the developers actually care about what you have to say (most of the time)."

Right, it's not like they would be more inclined to say: "Most people don't need that, write it yourself."

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[mini me]

For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.

But for those users, both OOo and Office are free (at least as far as they are concerned). Given that, why bother with OOo when you are already familiar with Office?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, admittedly, we were talking about a feature that isn't in very high demand. That is what scripting is supposed to be used for -- special things like that. Really, I don't see this whole copy/paste problem as requiring more than a quick little script, but I just thought I would mention that the OOo developers care more about what their users ask for than the MS Office team.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I've had similar problems with MSO applications:

1) I've often seen this exact behavior in MS Word, including 2000, 2002/XP, and 2003 (haven't tried 2007 yet), and on much beefier machines. I've sometimes watched CPU utilization during this, and Word isn't hogging the CPU; I can't hear it thrashing the disk either. I'm guessing they've got threads rendering different parts of the document, and those threads aren't well coordinated.

2) MS Word has trashed documents of mine, even small ones. Usually it's just the formatting that's completely hosed, but sometimes the content is unrecoverable. Backups are a Good Thing. And don't get me started on MS Access, the least stable common desktop application I've ever seen, yet it often contains the most important content, business data.

3) I still see this with MSO 2003 applications, but it has improved over earlier versions.

- T

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[vux984]

65000 rows? In a spreadsheet?
Strikes me that most of them should probably be in a database.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[legirons]

Not being able to export PDFs from a word processor is a real deal-breaker in most companies - it's insane that MS Word could screw-up something as simple as this.

And no: external plugins and "printer drivers" aren't a suitable replacement. (imagine your tech support explaining that people need to print a document when they want to save it... "why doesn't the export menu work?")

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[forgotten_my_nick]

I only have one thing bad to say about OOo. That is templates. If someone can point me to templates then I'd change my mind. :)

Otherwise it is grand. Everything works fine, UI is grand. Impress + Draw + Writer are pretty much used daily.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Master of Transhuman]

"This is non news except that it's IBMs name and not some single dev schmuck in the middle of the Ukraine, modding OO."

Uhm, that happens to be what makes it news. As an article mentions, Lotus Notes is used by millions of people who might be further interested in this - which means OO (and ODF) might - I say, might - get a big boost.

More importantly, since this appears to be based on a 1.x OO fork, how does it compare with OO 2.x? That's what I'd like to know (without going to the trouble of downloading, installing and testing it myself since I don't have the time right now and besides which, I'm lazy.)

If it's not as good as OO 2.x, why bother (other than the Lotus Notes integration, which is mostly a boon for IBM and Notes users)? In the latter case, it's like Thunderbird and the Eudora client - it's mostly just useful for former Eudora users. An OO useful for Lotus Notes users is fine, but it's not going to really change the track for OO 2.x if it's not compatible enough except for document opening.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Master of Transhuman]

"Computers will work well enough with almost no support(I have seen no MS shop staff support at adequate numbers to keep the machines running), and the support personal are usually semi-skilled so if they complain about over work, they are easily replaced."

Got that right. Which is why there are thousands of freelance PC tech support people barely eking out a living as well.

Nobody - or very few, anyway - wants to pay for "transparency", as a new client of mine refers to it, i.e., stuff that works well enough that they don't have to think about it. Which is almost impossible to achieve with Windows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[WhiteWolf666]

Yep, seems outdated.

Just pulled up NeoOffice. No problem creating a sheet with 60,000 rows. Not sure what the actual limit is now.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Gr8Apes]

I've worked in everything from 40 to 100K+ sites. I've also had the displeasure of dealing with precisely the big brother lock-down environment you describe. That one had 3 virus outbreaks in a single 12 month period. (i.e., if you don't manage the machines, it doesn't matter WTF you put up network wise to supposedly block threats) It also caused massive problems with trying to obtain the tools, documentation, and support sites required for our development work. They also hadn't learned that it's not a good idea to have 20K people on what appeared to be a minimally routed flat network.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[pastraga]

Symphony Beta seemed to me slow and buggy-prone (Java errors). It does not care (like other OO packages!) to read Windows user preferences and I have not been able to change the default U.S. units (argh!) for SI ones. Incidentally, the spreadsheet has no R1C1 option, a no-go for this user. As it stands, Novell's continues to be the best OO but still lags MS Office in speed and comfort - but things should improve.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Chandon Seldon]

I've also never encountered any of the problems you describe. Do you have a test case document that shows these problems in OOo?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

So is that the release that just became available today? That's still a ways behind Office XP.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[davidsyes]

This is just pitiful.

I was hoping for SmartSuite to be refreshed and released as open source, in tandem with code-sharing with OO. I STILL use SmartSuite, in Win4Lin. I refuse to use xp, 2k, much less vista, at home. I am using Win4Lin 4.x in PCLinuxOS 2006, and it is very stable. I WISH IBM would release SmartSuite code to OO.o. Share it, bring back good stuff to SmartSuite.

OO.o Writer is vastly inferior to WordPro. Base is vastly inferior to Approach. Calc is like 5% too jumbo-ish in appearance as compared to 1-2-3. Merging these would be better since OO.o DOES have some newer, niftier features that S/S has not got. WordPro cannot properly import or open certain ms word documents and 1-2-3 cannot properly open some hexed cell sheets with even just cell BORDER formatting.

IBM, you're being sabotaged internally by those who secretly HATE SmartSuite.

So sad. All these years gone by with SmartSuite getting NOTHING but maintenance packs or the like. SmartSuite has a thoroughly professional interface, and several apps (Approach in particular) had won awards more than once by various computer magazines publishers. What has OO.o got by way of awards. Near-perfect Clone of ms orifice?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[pseudorand]

> now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.

I think you're forgetting:
#1) There are millions of MS Office documents out there, which OpenOffice doesn't always read correctly, especially powerpoint. The cost of switching is almost certainly prohibitive. Oh, wait. Office 2007 documents aren't backwards compatible without a patch, which many organizations don't allow you to download. Forget about #1.

#2) Millions of workers already know how to use MS Office. Though the differences in menu organization man seem superficial to I.T. people, they're monumental to other users. Oh, wait. Office 2007 totally reorganizes everything, making I.T. people and other users alike curse the day Bill Gates was born. Forget about #2.

#3) Say what you like about Windows and Microsoft's business practices, but Microsoft Office is actually a really good product that works. It's not perfect, but it's still faster and better than OpenOffice. Oh, wait, Office 2007 screwed all that up too.

I guess we should be thanking Microsoft, not IBM, for giving OpenOffice a chance at being a market player.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

#1) There are millions of MS Office documents out there, which OpenOffice doesn't always read correctly, especially powerpoint. The cost of switching is almost certainly prohibitive. Oh, wait. Office 2007 documents aren't backwards compatible without a patch, which many organizations don't allow you to download. Forget about #1.

easily fixable through an importer thats probably gonna come along shortly with the aid of ibm developers

#2) Millions of workers already know how to use MS Office. Though the differences in menu organization man seem superficial to I.T. people, they're monumental to other users. Oh, wait. Office 2007 totally reorganizes everything, making I.T. people and other users alike curse the day Bill Gates was born. Forget about #2.

ditto. interface changes, more user friendliness will fix that.

#3) Say what you like about Windows and Microsoft's business practices, but Microsoft Office is actually a really good product that works. It's not perfect, but it's still faster and better than OpenOffice. Oh, wait, Office 2007 screwed all that up too.

the only good product that works was xp, and now microsoft is turning it to a backdoor/trojan. unacceptable for a business's privacy, and info.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Run4yourlives]

Ha! Hardly.

The one area where MS DOMINATES is the office market. This is by far one of the best designed and well thought out platforms in use today. For all it's problems, nothing comes close.

Open Office doesn't come close for the average user. Sorry, no dice. If IBM figures it could kill outlook with Lotus notes, it obviously hasn't ever used either.

Take a look at what Google is doing: They're trying to beat MS by shifting the entire way people think about using office. They're also pointing their products at a very unique subset of users.

IBM, as IBM does, is just trying to go head to head with the industry leader. This is the position Corel was in with WP, they lost. This is exactly what Sun tried. They Failed. Hell, IBM has even tried this with Lotus, and failed miserably.

MS is a lost case? History is laughing at you.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[anomalous cohort]

This is just a guess but I would say that OO has about 85% of what MSO has. This is not really a problem because us mere mortals use only about 50% of what MSO has anyway.

As far as the retraining issue is concerned, I don't see that as a big barrier either. There is so much difference between versions of MSO, that users who need to be trained on office productivity software, will most likely need to be retrained on each version of MSO anyway. If you have to incur the costs of retraining every three years no matter what, then what difference does it make whether or not you are retraining on MSO or OO?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Run4yourlives]

Like most advocates, you missed a glaringly obvious option that he has: Just keep using the product he has.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[DrSkwid]

The ODF would mean that one could write an external script to create an eps/svg/whatever version of the grapoh you want.

While Windows users stare dumbfounded at the screen and curse the brick wall they just hit, we crazy unixers quickly solve shit like that all the time, it's no biggy.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

corel is not ibm. google is not ibm. ibm is THE ibm. the god damn ibm that the concept of PC came from. its IBM PC compatibles in fact, not pc.

you really do not have a grasp of what scale is ibm at.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Run4yourlives]

>you really do not have a grasp of what scale is ibm at.

It's 2007, not 1986. I know exactly what IBM stands for: loss.

  - PC Market: LOST
  - OS Market: LOST
  - Corporate Application Market: LOST
  - Business Services Market: LOSING
  - Web/Internet Market: COMPLETELY MISSED THIS BOAT

Big Blue isn't all that relevant any more. The whole reason they're even involved in Open Source is that they're trying to leverage R&D that costs them nothing.

They are the GM of the tech sector. They are all but dead in any form of innovation. When you can't innovate, it's only a matter of time until you die. (Which in IBM's case, due to size, may be a while)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think the old PDF chestnut is vastly overrated in these discussions. It's wheeled out by supporters of OpenOffice because they have no other argument to make (except possibly the extra categories of style, but those are even less relevant considering how buggy the style and page layout support in OO is).

It is perfectly possible for professionals who need to generate serious PDF files using Word, and having seen this done in several offices, I don't see how you can possibly claim that Acrobat isn't a suitable replacement for a built-in feature. For casual use, OpenOffice's feature is helpful, but it's so buggy that it's not actually useful for professional work. There are bugs with many votes that have been logged for years on this but still not fixed.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

lets make an analogy :

u.s. economy going upside down. u.s. dollar is at an all time low. u.s. is bad-boy of international community. there are 'better' performing countries, economic unions, international organizations everywhere.

yet, u.s. is still the biggest player on the face of the earth.

i think you got my meaning.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[pseudorand]

> easily fixable through an importer thats probably gonna come along shortly with the aid of ibm developers

It wouldn't totally surprise me, but I doubt it's "easily fixable". Microsoft has spend years and billions developing office. It's no trivial task to write a program that implements all of it's features correctly. Look at HTML for example. Even with a published spec, HTML renders differently on different browsers. And there's no published spec for MS office docs.

> ditto. interface changes, more user friendliness will fix that

Again, that's not easily fixable. While it's easy to make the UI do anything you want, deciding what you want it do it /is/ difficult. You need to to make it simple enough for first time users, feature-rich enough for power users, and make the UI give people useful queue's to go from one to the other. computer-human interaction is a field of its own.

> the only good product that works was xp, and now microsoft is turning it to a backdoor/trojan. unacceptable for a business's privacy, and info.

That's exactly why XP isn't a good product. W2K was a pretty good product as far as the OS is concerned. Server 2003 is a good product (though I've still seen a blue screen or two, though they may have been hardware related). But Office is the real crown jewels that keeps people buying the shitty desktop OS specifically because it does what I describe in the previous bullet.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

How is that behind Office XP? I just checked Office 2K3 (work machine) and it has only 64K rows. I thought XP only had 32K rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[unity100]

It wouldn't totally surprise me, but I doubt it's "easily fixable". Microsoft has spend years and billions developing office. It's no trivial task to write a program that implements all of it's features correctly. Look at HTML for example. Even with a published spec, HTML renders differently on different browsers. And there's no published spec for MS office docs.

you are totally missing very important facts.

microsoft didnt spent billions of $ and years to develop office. they spent them to develop office, windows versions, AND to make sure that everyone stays tied to their products. this is the reason why office, windows versions are still too backwards in comparison to the effort/cash spent on them. its still going on with vista, and even now xp, you know, they are making changes to the xp code without people's info or consent. instead of bettering their product, they are going for control, since they were founded.

now see the opposite. mozilla firefox, thunderbird, numerable o/s projects. despite lack of funding, despite centralization, despite little investment, they have succeeded major strides in comparison to what ms products did with the investment they got.

this is due to a sole reason - if you make something more open, it goes forward. check the concept of PC.

pc is just an alias for ibm pc compatibles. ibm pc is ibm's personal computer brand. what did they do, you proabably know. instead of barring people, they allowed, encouraged and licensed that everyone produced stuff for it, even the PC concept itself. so today we have an IBM PC in front of all of us. (others are minority still).

enter openoffice, and bolstered effort with ibm.

openness goes forward rule NEVER failed during the course of history. it will succeed again.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[CAIMLAS]

Nothing I'd be willing to share; it's an unpublished work, as of now. But you can get a general idea if you try importing/opening any -formatted- document (OOo or DOC) in OOo over, say, 30 pages in length and/or with graphics. This may not be teh case with 3.0GHz+ machines (at least as much of a case, at least), but it is with anything under, say, 2GHz-2.3GHz.

I can also note that I've got a friend who was trying to use OOo 2.x on his thesis about a year back (9 months?) and he had continual problems relating to document size (mainly the sluggishness and freezing). He tried OOo 1.x for a while and then finally bit the bullet and bought a copy of office (OOo 2.x wasn't working properly, and 1.x didn't have teh features, so...)

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[CAIMLAS]

Oh, I won't disagree with you there. But, in the cases where I've had hosed data, at least MSO was able to recover the data. Don't ask me how, but a non-formated 100-printed-page OOo document shouldn't be over 9Mb, especially if it has no images in it. Running strings, trying to extract the archive, etc. were unable to recover its content (if there was any content left in it). One moment I'm typing, and the next, *bam* down OOo goes; then it repeatedly crashed while trying to recover the document before I tried to figure out what was going on...

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[RobBebop]

I'm in the same boat you are, where I prefer open source but will admit that MSO has some advantages. I've never experienced loss or slowness during operation of OO Writer. I do note that on a Windows platform, that OO Writer takes longer to startup than MS Word. I believe the reason for this is optimizing code that MS has inserted because they are the Gods of their proprietary software and this gives them to right. Similarly, OO Writer starts up faster on a Linux platform than MS Word.

See that, now? It is a joke and is also pointing out a HUGE flaw with MS software. It can only generally be expected to run on (supported) versions of Windows. Sure, in the past there was a Mac port of MSO... but quite frankly the whole "single environment" situation makes it 3-times easier to write the code.

Also, since you mentioned that you are a creative person, take a look at my manuscript that is linked in my sig. It was written entirely with OO Writer... just so you know that I have some experience on the platform (though the difference _may_ be that the OS which I used was Fedora Core 4 and later Fedora 6).

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[owlstead]

Document scrolling can suck in Word as well. I've had numerous problems with some pictures in Word and scrolling. A lot of times my Word or display driver (latest Nvidia) screws up and leaves artifacts on the pages. I've also lost many files that I edited with Word, or getting them back was as painful as retyping the whole thing. The crash handling in OOo is at least better than that of Word. That said, such applications should not crash so easily, and I've had stability problems with both office suites. I haven't had too much problems with slowness yet, then again, I am a developer and my machines are always rather up to date. Sometimes it (OOo) starts a bit slow, but I can live with that.

Many many things I like better in OOo. Some things I don't like at all. But especially OOo writer is a rather mature application, and I dare say that the interface and general structure of the application is *way* better than Word. Such as bookmarks, the whole table handling (ordering rows etc), updating fields, formatting - I've used both rather extensively, and OOo Writer has many advantages. Cannot say the same thing about the draw and presentation packages though - these are just too shallow if compared to their Office counterparts.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Chandon Seldon]

I just played around a bit with translating a 850 page PDF book to HTML and then pasting the resulting formatted text into OO Writer. It worked perfectly - typing stuff, changing formatting, inserting more images. I've got a decent machine - but it's not a factor of 20 better than yours.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[aevans]

If the process of accomplishing the same task is objectively inferior, you can't say it's just a difference in work flow. If you use a spreadsheet for more than separating text into columns, there are so many features that Excel has that Calc doesn't, it's ridiculous to compare them. It makes the Photoshop users' complaints about Gimp seem trivial.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in 'big business' is free. Open Office from IBM will not be free, like Red Hat Linux for business is not 'free'.

I just hope that for these businesses that IBM will not overprice the cost of ownership for Open Office, making it attractive for big business to start to adopt the lesser used package.

Cost of ownership means:
    Migration of existing documents
    Roll out of software
    Training Costs
    Support Costs
    Extra costs associated with doing business with companies using Microsoft Office .... I am sure there is a whole lot more

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[aevans]

The parent poster isn't serious, don't bother wasting time. Either he is a fanboy who has never actually used Open Office and so has not experienced it's many glaring shortcomings, or he is an advocate who is being disingenuous about known problems.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[aevans]

How many project managers, useability testers, and feature designers are IBM adding to the project?

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[HiThere]

Does OOo.calc still capitalize words whether you want it to or not? I don't have many uses for a spreadsheet, but the one's that I do require that *I* be in charge of how things are capitalized ... so I switched to gnumeric, even though I use OOo for most office suite appications.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

They could resurrect Improv: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[joeljkp]

Well, I'd argue first that people don't have to back it up - they'll use what they like, and until most people like OOo better, MS will have some nice cash flow.

On the other hand, I dislike OOo for two reasons at the moment (I'm sure others will come up later on, along with a few "Wow, cool!" moments too). First, the chart functionality in Calc is a bear to use. Try making a variety of charts on differently-organized data in Excel, then try the same thing in Calc, and you'll understand.

Secondly, Base is nowhere near Access in terms of functionality. One of the main reasons Access is cool for small workgroup type stuff is that you can split the database into a data file and a front-end file, then you can share the data file on the network for easy multi-user access. Not so with OOo.

Also, you can't export the data from an OOo embedded database. The workaround I came up with was to open each table, select everything, and drag it over to a Calc spreadsheet, then save it to CSV from there.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

No, Excel in Office XP has (practically) no limit on rows. That's why I purchased it, I've got one spreadsheet with well over 200K rows.

You have to check that you're not running in Compatability Mode, which limits to 64K so prior versions of Excel can open the documents as well.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[jonadab]

> More importantly, since this appears to be based on a 1.x OO fork

Okay, wow. Talk about being out of date.

I mean, I _remember_ OO 1.x, sure (heck, I remember when StarOffice was produced by StarDivision), but for that matter I also _remember_ Emacs 19, Netscape 2, and EDLIN. That doesn't mean I can imagine wanting to use any of the above today.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[david@ecsd.com]

Not sure what sort of setup/build you're using, but when I first decided to use openoffice for my writing, I tested it out on some Project Gutenberg texts. Neither "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" nor "Dracula" caused it to break a sweat in the initial pasting into my template or editing later on.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

From the Excel 2003 help file (Worksheet specifications):

Worksheet size 65,536 rows by 256 columns

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

When writing my doctoral thesis, I tried using a mixture of programms.
Starting on PageMaker6.5 (yep - some time ago), I then switched to MSWord (for reasons I shall not go into here), but was getting exasperated with Word losing my formatting, trashing my formulae and generally bitching around whenever I added images.
I then switched to OpenOffice, and never regretted it.
My document storage size halved, I could edit paragraphs and styles and add images and formulae without having half my work corrupted and I could actually scroll through the 500page monster without waiting every 10 pages for the software to catch up.

So, don't say OOo doesn't have the power, I experienced the exact opposite.
Yes, it has its own learning curve, and writing macros was a pain with the lack of documentation, but take the time to learn how o use it and it's great.
Oh, did I mention it's free, and the upgrade from .swf(?) to .odt went without a hitch.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

Really? How do you get that?

Microsoft says that Excel 2002 (XP) has only 64K rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Bert64]

That documentation is obsolete...
OpenOffice since version 2.0 has supported 65535 rows, version 1.x and earlier supported 32768 rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, the gp gives a horrible argument for why calc is inferior. However, I use it on a daily bases (I have to, being on linux) but i really miss (after >4 years not using excel) some features:
- select/copy/paste non-adjacent cells
- no solver for non-linear problems (goal seek is not the same). The only tool I found that can do non-linear parameter estimation on linux with a gui is (ugly and buggy) xmgrace (alternatively I could use R and spend 2 days figuring out the syntax...again).
- absolutely horrible and useless chart support. I need to be able to define absolute error bars. In bugzilla for years, seems trivial to add, but nobody works on it. Luckily, gnumeric supports this. So I switch to it occasionally, but gnumeric has other problems, and the copy/paste between it and calc is a bit weird.
- I never could find a shortcut key to quickly change relative to absolute cell references (I think it was f3/f4 on excel).

Now, I tried fixing some of this stuff myself, that is, until I actually looked at the oo.org code. It is just too big of a project for me to make casual contributions to. It's too complex. The kernel or kde are also big, but not nearly so difficult to find your way in as OO.org.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

Excel 2007 supports 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

And from Excel 2007, it's 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[sconeu]

And your point is? You said that Excel XP (2002) had more than 64K rows. Excel 2007 is non-sequiter.

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[TopShelf]

I misspoke earlier, I meant Excel 2007, which is the current version. My apologies...

Re:Ms, your case is lost

[noahclem]

MS Word didn't screw this up, Adobe prevented it. See http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6079320.html. Microsoft caved to Adobe's demand because it was scared of the EU case. Adobe also got MS to drop its own competing portable format. And after Monday's EU CFI decision affirming the EC slap on them for bundling media player (I really can't imagine a more innocuous product), it looks like Microsoft read that situation right.

IBM Who'd a thunk it

[Photonic Shadow]

As an Apple kind of a guy I used to view IBM as the enemy. No longer. Big Blue has been taking an approach to computing and IT over the past decade or so that is technically astute, and thus over the long haul economically astute.

PS

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[betterunixthanunix]

Big Blue has always design top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for
And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[hey!]

IBM Who'd a thunk it

<shudder/> Ugh. So far as who is concerned, I always associated that word with Microsoft and the 8088.

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[betterunixthanunix]

Should have read:

Big Blue has always designed top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for <1s responsiveness to keystrokes (any higher latency and you cut into productivity).

And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[GreggBz]

Yes, I've gained respect for IBM in recent years.

I read the Wikipedia article a few weeks ago. I like where they describe the Jams, which is basically a technology to enable massive online discussions, and a subsequent technology that analyzes all the text for themes. The got everything down to a few phrases:

"Dedication to every client's success"
"Innovation that matters - for our company and for the world"
"Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships"

Not to sound campy, but that's a pretty awesome mission statement.

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been said that the whole purpose of IBM software and hardware is to get as many IBM consultants working as employees in your IT department as possible.

Re:IBM Who'd a thunk it

[MrDoh1]

Working in a large organization that uses some IBM mainframes, that certainly agrees with what I have seen.

Branding madness

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM are supporting OpenOffice.org? Great! Why do they feel the need to brand OpenOffice.org as "Lotus Symphony" though? It may be a good short-term brand (More IBM customers know about Lotus than OpenOffice.org) but long-term there would surely be more benefit from sticking with OpenOffice.org Perhaps IBM hired away the Sun marketing department. I don't know.

Re:Branding madness

[zarlino]

This is NOT a branded OpenOffice! This is a completely different software based on the Eclipse Platform.

Re:Branding madness

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the ".org" in the name. It's a logical abomination and a social embarrassment. I vince every time I *have* to say it for some reason, and only distribute copies of OO with it removed (except where it's about the OpenOffice website proper, of course).

I love the software and what it has done to the entire office suite landscape, but hate the over-geeky silly name.

Re:Branding madness

[davecb]

Oh dear, it even looks like Cacaphony...
one of the worst products Lotus ever
wrote (;-))

--dave

Re:Branding madness

[mrsmiggs]

According to the WSJ that's incorrect:

"Symphony is based on software available from Open Office, a development project that also provides the basis of Sun Microsystems Corp.'s Star Office and a Google Inc. desktop-software suite."

I imagine that IBM the only real difference between the Symphony and Open Office will be the integration with Lotus notes and user interface to go with it.

Hmm...

[bhtooefr]

Funny. IBM creating a branch of a project that was a fork of a Sun product (which is now a branch of it.)

Even funnier, IBM already had a product to do just this, Lotus SmartSuite. (Then again, seeing as it was last updated... what, in 2000? 1999? Somewhere in there? it wasn't going to succeed. ;) Wonder if Lenovo will end up putting this on every ThinkPad that doesn't ship with MS Office... they DO hand out SmartSuite licenses already...)

Re:Hmm...

[AbbyNormal]

True, but not a whole lot of small business managers care or have heard of Sun. Most everyone has heard of IBM and know that they have "bank", so to speak. This is an amazing development. More importantly is the government use of Lotus and the transition to this office suite.

Re:Hmm...

[Nimey]

Y'know the really funny thing? Back in the day, IBM bundled StarOffice (I think 3.0 or thereabouts) with OS/2 Warp 3.0. That was back when StarOffice was owned by the independent Star Division.

Full-circle & all that.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, ok, jed... go back and play with yours, too, though...

Re:Hmm...

[pimpimpim]

I got smartsuite with my aptiva 100 mhz in the second half of the 90s, and it was a blast! A very well made program with excellent equation editor, and easily costumizable. It really was a pleasure to use. I think it died because of lack of critical mass, MS forced its junk on every PC thinkable, along with the OS, IBM only had access to software on their own PCs.

And, allowing myself to add an open wish to IBM: please, fix the OOo stability before adding new features. For example, OOo over NFS will drive one mad at the moment, it just locks up completely. The default configuration seems very NFS unfriendly as well.

Re:Hmm...

[jp10558]

Commenting on this, I actually like Lotus SmartSuite and prefer Word Pro as a word processor. Maybe because I started using it back in 1996 on my first Windows PC. It would be nice if they would open source that suite if they're not going to update it. I expect there's a minority who would like to be able to use it, and maybe pay for or get small updates / bug fixes like ODF support etc. Personally its one of the applications that keeps me on Windows.

On the other hand, I do so little word processing any more that I only open it 3 times a year.

Re:Hmm...

[sasdrtx]

No shit. I loved AmiPro 10-15 years ago.... it was fast and as capable as Word, which was a dog. Word is still a dog (continual featuritus the main culprit).

80% of the Word docs I see could easily been handled with Wordpad, More complicated docs are never done with any skill, and certainly with no style other than "normal".

I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

...isn't this actually a direct challenge to OpenOffice?

Re:I don't understand

[stm2]

No, it is not. IBM have people working on Open Office, they will want to make OO better since they will use it as a base for its Symphony Office. The same way Sun does with Star Office.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

problem is: symphony is a fork based on ooo1.3, and rumor goes, it's pretty much off the trunk (eclipse rcp integration and everything)

Re:Is it?

[Ajehals]

Ahem - This may clear it up for you.

Although the word "universal" may be a bit much.

Re:Is it?

[MountainMan101]

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

It's the MS format that doesn't have ISO status. The free and open OASIS standard does.

Re:Is it?

[Mathiasdm]

ODF is an ISO standard (this page is supposed to show it, but it's apparently down): http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485
It's been an ISO standard since November 2006.

Re:Is it?

[volsung]

I think ODF is an ISO standard now: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

parent is on crack. anonymously, of course.

Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[scottsk]

Okay ... so what is this? The "news" article had no details at all. Have they open-sourced SmartSuite? If you throw out the stupid third paragraph which has no meaningful information, and cull the meaningful information from the first two paragraphs, the story says "document, spreadsheet and presentation software in a group of tools" which doesn't tell you what these are - are they re-branding OpenOffice like StarOffice does? And it will be "called Lotus Symphony" -- is this a Lotus product? Are they open sourcing SmartSuite with Lotus 1-2-3 like I've been dreaming for years? Is this brand-new software technology IBM has developed? I want to know more!

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[beaverbrother]

It looks like it is actually available for download here

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[ch33kymonk3y]

Symphony is related to OpenOffice and because IBM are part of openoffice.org the additions will, i assume, go back into the core openoffice product. I believe Smartsuite had licensing issues that made it a non starter. There is also an element of eclipse in the product as well, drawing the UI.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[Rgb465]

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

Looks like its a modified version of OpenOffice. I doubt it will share anything more than the name with the old Lotus Symphony.

Oh, and FYI, OpenOffice is a re-branded StarOffice, not the other way around.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[scottsk]

I'd be really curious to know what licensing issues there were in SmartSuite - I thought IBM completely bought out Lotus.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[TheRaven64]

I can't speak for SmartSuite specifically, but proprietary software often uses proprietary libraries that the developer has bought distribution rights, but nothing else, for. This was the case with StarOffice, which used a third party spell checker and thesaurus. When Sun bought it and opened the source they needed to remove these features, and the community had to add them again. The same happened with Java.

Depending on how central the third party proprietary code is to SmartSuite, it might be easier to start from scratch than try to replace it.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[mdm-adph]

I like the site, but who the hell chose that ugly italic font on that page for some of the titles? Ugh! Seriously, it looks dated as hell.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[tji]

Wow, those screenshots look about a decade behind current versions of MS Office or Apple iWork. AbiWord looks significantly better than the Lotus word processor (judging only by the screenshots and having used AbiWord). The least they could do is spice up their marketing pages a bit, and put their best foot forward.

Are those apps from their old Lotus suite? I used those way back in the OS/2 2.x days, when they were the only option for OS/2 Office Suites. The apps don't look like they've improved much since then.

Or, are they (as some here claim) based on OpenOffice?

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[ben kohler]

Are we looking at the same page? I honestly thought the screenshots looked pretty good. The courier-like font used in the toolbars is a little unusual, but certainly not awful.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[spud603]

No mac version. Nor most Linux distros...

System requirements from the FAQ:

Lotus Symphony supports both Microsoft Windows® and Linux® platforms.

Note: Be sure your system meets these client system requirements:

* Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5
* 900MB disk space minimum
* 1GB RAM memory minimum
* US English locale

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[tji]

I don't know.. Here's what I'm looking at:

Lotus word processor (ugly tables and charts, and the fabulous "Star" clipart. Definitely "retro"): http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa

AbiWord screenshots (simple and clean): http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/

Apple iWork08 'Pages' (fancy page layout): http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[rudlavibizon]

De gustibus non est disputandum!
I don't see anything wrong with it too, especially compared to AbiWord. And iWork looks too Macish for me.

Re:Not a news story - no details - what is this?

[Eponymous Bastard]

From their general FAQs:

Are the IBM Lotus Symphony tools different from the embedded productivity tools delivered in IBM Lotus Notes v. 8?

        * No. The tools have the same functionality but have different names:
            . IBM Lotus Symphony was IBM Productivity tools
            . Lotus Symphony Documents was Lotus Documents
            . Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets was Lotus Spreadsheets
            . Lotus Symphony Presentations was Lotus Presentations

Nobody gets fired for..

[Dareth]

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.

Will anybody get fired for buying both?

Re:Nobody gets fired for..

[Photonic Shadow]

But IBM in this case is free right?

So, is it true that

Nobody gets fired for getting IBM for free, and not buying Microsoft?

PS

Re:Nobody gets fired for..

[Warbothong]

Well if you have that kind of money then go ahead. I can't say if it will be a wise investment or not though http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=MSFT&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=IBM

Re:Nobody gets fired for..

[obeythefist]

I think they might if OOo now includes what is widely regarded as the finest of all email clients, Lotus Notes...

Lotus Symphony was great

[csoto]

Back when I had a bitchen Color Graphics Adapter (8 colors!) and Quadram Quadboard in my IBM PC...

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, CGA was 4 colours...

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[Anonymous Coward]

CGA has all you needed for office software, but...

You were lucky!

When I were a lad, we had to download porn on a 9600 bit modem from bulletin boards, and view it dithered on EGA displays, and if you got a woody you were lucky! And we were grateful for it.

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[dosius]

4 in graphics, 16 in text.

-uso.

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah! I ran it in amber monochrome, the way God intended. If I needed "color", I ran an emulator.

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, when a memory board populated with 64k chips packed wall to wall, cost $1,200.00, and a 5 meg HDD ("full high") cost $800.00, and the IRS would't let you deduct any of it, because they ordained it was used only for playing Duke Nukem, the first, and the only sounds were "beep" and silence.

Re:Lotus Symphony was great

[csoto]

4 colors, but two "intensities" per color. This got you "8 color" (marketing-wise, at least).

Download link

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM Lotus Symphony, download for Win32 and Linux.

Re:Download link

[flonker]

I'm not sure if these will work for everyone or not, but worth a try.

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Windows XP
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJQvRVpuvAMRGZICElHB1rt-9Co/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064446/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.8uUTWVE8JKR2RCvoT1Mv2y093nI/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe

IBM Lotus Symphony Beta for Linux
Version Beta 1
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVUYMJTrHj5PZ1gYO1AuRVoYsLft_Ng/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4064448/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.454SxXBIifOb60VOxPqOEJlyS5g/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin

Re:Download link

[cerebrum_interfectum]

Thank you for the direct download link, since this is what I got after trying to go through IBM's download pages: "This offering is not available in your country. message code: 47e" What does this mean, they think I'm Hitman(tm) or something?

Re:Download link

[RetroGeek]

Yikes! Only 12k/s.

We need a bittorrent...

Re:Download link

[carandol]

Well, it works from the UK, but the system requirements include a US locale and 1Gb of memory, so it doesn't look like I'll be using it any time soon. Interesting screen shots though -- definitely not the same interface as OpenOffice.

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Not premature, but undue hype all the same. You would think that after ISO lost most of its credibility in this field following the recent OOXML mess, people wouldn't assign much value to any document format just because it's been ISO certified.

Does this mean....

[idiotnot]

....that SmartSuite is dead now?

Admittedly, OpenOffice is now a better product, but it seems a waste to let some pretty good code (WordPro, 1-2-3, etc.) just go the way of OS/2.

Re:Does this mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

but it seems a waste to let some pretty good code (WordPro, 1-2-3, etc.)

Nope. The good code was wasted when they went from AmiPro (which was awesome) to WordPro (where they somehow managed to completely screw it up).

Re:Does this mean....

[mdm-adph]

Aye -- as far as I know, it's good and dead. They're not planning on moving it up to Vista from what I hear.

Re:Does this mean....

[metamatic]

SmartSuite has been "maintenance only" for at least a couple of years now. No new development is planned as far as I know. That said, I'm not in product management, so this is merely informed heresay :-)

(Opinions mine, not IBM's.)

Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[iBod]

IBM has a long history of adopting failed, failing or about-to-fail products. Lotus Notes was a classic example.

Even products with some hope of recovery have been driven to their doom by IBM.

IBM are the kings of big computers and big operating systems - they haven't got a clue about desktop software.

Leave it alone IBM!

NYT piece on IBM's move

[MLCT]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/technology/18blue.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

Coverage of the announcement plus some comments on the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF. As for the announcement - the 35 FT developers on OOO can't be a bad thing - OOO has the potential to become a large force for good, but it has always been a couple of steps away from where it could, and should, be - hopefully this might help rectify that.

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[SmilingSalmon]

35 FT developers on OOO can't be a bad thing

Unless you get in their way. A 35 FT developer could crush your house!

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[nine-times]

of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun

Don't forget Novell. And supposedly Apple is building some kind of ODF support into their next OS.

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[2Bits]

the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF.

Yeah, I'll be more impressed when these firms ditched MS Office totally, and replace it with OO for internal use, and maybe force their suppliers to also use OO (otherwise, no deal!). I want to see all their sales people use exclusively OO too.

I remember that a few years, when OO was just out, a Sun's product manager was doing a presentation using PPT (surprise, surprise!), while bitching about how MS Office was so bad, and how OO was going to be the future. After listening to half an hour of bitching and moaning, I couldn't stand it anymore, and said:"Listen, if you think that MS Office is so bad, and OO is going to be the future, why are you not using OO? And what are you using right now?" He wasn't amused though.

Seriously, these companies need to eat their own dog food. We use OO internally in our company.

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, these companies need to eat their own dog food. We use OO internally in our company.

I make dog food you insensitive clod!

Re:NYT piece on IBM's move

[SwedishPenguin]

Seeing as Google is apparently using Ubuntu and other Linux dists for desktops, I would assume they're not using MS Office.

Re:Is it?

[arivanov]

Err... No. It is.

And as far as "universal" this is called "marketing & PR". A beautiful move actually because out of all editable document standards this is the most popular one and it has some market share in all countries. So they can actually safely claim "universal" without being dragged through the mud for misselling it

In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[aim2future]

My serious and optimistic view: Soon we will see computing interoperability and software development flourish and we will look back upon the MS dominant time where they were holding free software innovation and interoperability back as an annoying historic paranthesis.

The next important step in the world of computing now is to Stop software patents! To achieve the similar stimulance to software development as when the movie industry moved to California to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.

Support FFII and EFF

I guess noone is seriously interested in OOXML any more, but I collected some arguments about our company's opinions about OOXML recently.

If you are interested in reading people's blogs, here is mine about SCO finally dead! MS next?

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[mister_woods]

"Soon we will see computing interoperability and software development flourish and we will look back upon the MS dominant time where they were holding free software innovation and interoperability back as an annoying historic paranthesis."

There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them.

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[kansas1051]

To achieve the similar stimulance to software development as when the movie industry moved to California to avoid the film patents that were holding the film industry back on the east coast.

How did the movie industry avoid film patents by moving to California? U.S. patents have been enforceable anywhere an infringer resides since 1836. The article you cite says that the courts broke up the patent trust on antitrust grounds, which allowed independent studios to freely operate. Perhaps the courts are also the best way to stop software patents?

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[recoiledsnake]

How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? Atleast they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.

Re:In ten years, MS was an annoying paranthesis

[aim2future]

As recoiledsnake asks:

How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? At least they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.

Your questions are important ones and need good answers for those who don't see the obvious. I don't know if you read my blog entry "SCO finally dead! MS next?" even though I don't prove my statements there about Microsoft having hold free innovation back, merely indicates the explanation for those who have same type of insight as me, which is not rare, about 50% of the people I know have this insight.

However, if you are very young and have grown up with the PC only, no Unix, no Lisa, no Mac, no Amiga then I don't expect you to have this insight. To achieve this you need to care a lot about computers and have been around them for a few decades. For my own I took my MSc in engineering physics with a enhanced focus on computer science 1981. After that I was working with software development and systems design the next ten years, teaching, research and development the next ten years, resulting in a PhD in computer science 2003 (my thesis, pdf) and I am now working as a researcher and research consultant in own company when at the same time developing a new business idea a mass innovation concept Wish-IT® to encourage free innovation, to give consumers, manufacturers and investors what they want.

To make a few brief statements about Microsoft.

1. Bill Gates is smart, but he lacks visions and he doesn't really care much about computers and computer science. He is a hacker, but unfortunately lacking the philosophy and spirit of a hacker his interest was just to make money on computer hacks. OK, something he managed quite well though...
2. Bill Gates as being the

notes

[g4b]

Does that mean they will migrate Lotus Notes into OpenOffice to beat Outlook?

Just imagine that.

The OOo logo will be expanded with a big fat third bird on the right bottom, all painted in blue and orange.

(No, I have nothing against IBM, OOo or Notes, but I have to use Notes on a daily basis)

Re:notes

[morgan_greywolf]

Maybe. Rumours have been floating around on Groklaw for over a year about an IBM OOo-based office suite supporting ODF. Some have even suggested that a Notes client might end up being integrated into OOo, which would seem to be to IBM's benefit, since it would promote their Domino groupware server.

Re:notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Close, but not quite. How about integrating OpenOffice into Lotus Notes?

No, I'm not kidding...

http://www.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/productivitytools

Re:notes

[Belial6]

IBM already ships what is obviously OpenOffice with Notes 8. They are calling them "Helper Applications". I am very disappointed that they were not integrated though.

And will it...

[RAMMS EIN]

So, will this office suite, which is being sent to Lotus users, be backward compatible with what the recipients are currently using?

Will it be based on OpenOffice.org?

Will it run faster than OpenOffice.org?

Will it have a less clunky interface than common office suites?

Just some questions from a curious observer. :-)

Re:And will it...

[mdm-adph]

First off, I like the interface -- it's still familiar to users of current office software, but with a nice sorta "new" feel to it (the colors remind me of Office 2007 or the Notes 8 Beta).

I've tested it with a couple of SmartSuites files -- Word Pro and 1-2-3 -- and it seems to open them fairly nicely. They've must've tweaked the OpenOffice engine a bit to get them to work better with SmartSuite files, which "vanilla" OpenOffice sometimes had problems with.

One thing I like about it is the "tabbing" system -- whether I've got 1-2-3 files or Word Pro files open, they're all presented in a unified window, with tabs denoting the different documents. Now, that's something I'd like to see in other office suites.

Re:And will it...

[wnstb]

I downloaded it and have been checking it out..
Looks pretty good on Fedora.. much more polish than Open Office.

Multi-pronged attack

[downix]

With multiple vendors each supporting the same document format, it becomes a real fight for marketplace dominance. Microsoft Office better than Open Office, well there's Lotus Symphony, Sun Office and KOffice as well. I'm downloading Symphony right now to see if my editor that hates Open Office would find it more appealing. And, by being interchangeable, it does infact become a free-market economy, everyone on the same level playing field.

No 1 suite will do everything for everyone, so these variety of options only helps the overall marketplace.

Re:Multi-pronged attack

[betterunixthanunix]

KOffice needs a lot of work before I would call it a serious competitor. Right now, it has one advantage: it is light. It doesn't drain my battery as quickly as OOo does. But when it comes to serious document editing, I have to stick with OOo.

Re:Multi-pronged attack

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's what we have done (put a lot of work into it)! I think you will be pleasantly surprised by KOffice 2.0 that will be out sometime around new year.

Notes on Linux

[oyenstikker]

"IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux"

No. IBM is supporting Notes on RHEL and SLED. Attempts to install on other distributions will result in silent failures of the installer, undocumented files all over the place, or if you are really lucky (as I was) it will install, but then inexplicably fail to launch after two weeks of very buggy use.

Re:Notes on Linux

[Blakey Rat]

Attempts to install on other distributions will result in silent failures of the installer, undocumented files all over the place, or if you are really lucky (as I was) it will install, but then inexplicably fail to launch after two weeks of very buggy use.

So... it works as well on Linux as it does on Windows and OS X? :)

Re:Notes on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is just the kernel. The kernel just runs the basics and whatever else they decide would do better there. RHEL and SLED are the Operating Systems that Notes will run under. It appears this is one of those times where just stating Linux is not enough. You would need to state the distribution.

This is more common than most people think. At least for a little while. After a bit of time someone fixes the problems and it runs on almost all distros. With Notes being proprietary it is distro dependent.

Bring on OO.o re-branded and worked on by IBM.

Improvements

[Wowsers]

Maybe IBM could kick Sun up their behind and correct a problem with OpenOffice. I recently installed the current version of OO over a previous version, and rather than it installing in the partition I want it, the OO install gave no option where to save the installation. It then preceded to delete the old installation off of the preferred partition, and installed itself in the most stupid of places - the same drive that Windows lives on, making backups that much more difficult.

I hate installations that think the Windows drive / directory is the perfect place to install and give you no choice over it. I'd expect that behaviour from M$ installs.

Re:Improvements

[Chrisje]

I hate to say this but pretty much every serious software I've installed on Windows in the past 3 years has let me pin-point where to install it. Even the games do.

Don't expect that behavior from MS installs.

Re:Improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!! U said M$! LAWL!!!! U r0x. Keep fightin' da man!!!!

hmm.

[apodyopsis]

Just goes to show that even if MS get OOXML adopted as a standard by ISO by their various mechanisms and shenanigans - it would all come to nothing if there is a "de facto" standard already. And ODF is looking to be positioned to be just that.

It's not always the standards that people recognize and certify that win the day.

I look forward to the day when MS are forced to implement ODF filters for Office just to stay in the game. They once said that they would not support ODF - like any business they might have no choice if their sales are on the line. Once ODF is the standard then Office is going to have some real problems in the face of free alternatives that support the same format - MS biggest fear will be realized.

MS main weapons is proprietary formats and proprietary software and OOXML/Office is one of the biggest examples. (Yes I know OOXML is not "technically" proprietary anymore).

Re:hmm.

[mathfeel]

What are you talking about? OOXML is proprietary precisely by using "technology"...Can any one else implement it besides a single vendor??

Re:hmm.

[vldmr_krn]

Note the +5 moderation on this comment.

When an official standard-defining body releases a "standard" and Microsoft does its own thing resulting in the creation of a different de facto standard, Microsoft gets raked through the coals for ignoring standards.

So Microsoft changes their approach. They are attempting to get their architecture accepted by an official standard-defining body.

Now the popular opinion is that this is manipulative and will fortunately amount no nothing because there is an alternative that is on its way to becoming a de facto standard, which is what really matters.

The only constant in this culture is that Microsoft is the bad guy. The principles espoused by the community change as needed to maintain Microsoft's role as a bad guy.

already released

[Anonymous Coward]

see http://symphony.lotus.com/

(less or more) rebranded lotus productivity tools -> ooo1.3 bloated into eclipse with some eyecandy.

Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[rpjs]

I still think that was the best word processor I ever used.

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[3waygeek]

As a former developer on the WordPro team, I'd have to agree with you.

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> I still think that [AmiPro] was the best word processor I ever used.

Amen, brother! AmiPro had (heck, it still has!) a better interface than MS Word and was nearly as fast as the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS!

I think I heard from an AmiPro developer that parts of it were written in assembly language to achieve the speed.

AmiPro had a beautifully functional and easy-to-use interface for tables and figures. From the little that I've used Apple's Pages word processor, I think Pages may get as easy as AmiPro with a little more development.

If I didn't mind running Windows 3.1, I would gladly use AmiPro today.

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[Nimey]

If I didn't mind running Windows 3.1, I would gladly use AmiPro today.

Shirley you can run it in Windows XP? Or in WINE?

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[ClamBoy]

Preach on brother! I loved using AmiPro. Not sure whether this is nostalgia kicking in or not, but it had the most elegant implementation of paragraph styles I've used. To this day I dread working with paragraph styles in MSWord.

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[epedersen]

Yes you can run it in Windows XP, but it has a couple of problems, such as the mouse disappearing when you are over a document. Also it has no support for long file names (At least the version I run.)

Re:Wish they'd revive AmiPro

[Nimey]

There seems to have been a version 3 that is 32-bit; you should try looking for that.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[y86]

My company is still running lotus notes to this day. It's not a bad application.

Already in Lotus Notes 8 beta - six months ago

[ami.one]

Openoffice is already in Lotus Notes 8 and if you double click any ms office attachment it opens it in an embedded window/tab inside of LN8. Been availble in all LN8 betas since 6 months; so its not anything new except the branding 'sym phony' etc. Does make Lotus Notes 8 into a single solution for all messaging, office and browsing purposes.

How many versions are there?

[ThirdPrize]

So, how many different variations of Open Office will there be out there? The IBM one, the Sun one, the various Linux distro versions, NeoOffice, etc. I am sure I have missed a few. I can't help thinking this is all diluting the presence of Open Office.

Re:How many versions are there?

[Dunbal]

I can't help thinking this is all diluting the presence of Open Office.

      How many dark brown fizzy drinks are in your supermarket's "drinks" section? Some people like Coke. Some people like Pepsi. And some people like the "supermarket brand" cola. Now do you propose we eliminate a few brands because you have to do a few millisecond's worth of work in sorting out where your brand is on the shelf? OK. I say MY brand (not yours) is the one we keep. And on the other hand, have you even TRIED some of the "other" brands? Some of them are not bad at all!

Re:How many versions are there?

[ThirdPrize]

Cola is different as there are two main brands and loads of cheap immitations. OS software is all free and so the main factor of choice is what does it do extra. Each of these variations exists because someone wants to add/change the functionality of the aplication and make it different form the source. Like linux you will get the version that is easy to install, the techy version (X11) and the others.
The question becomes not who will get the largets share of the office market but who will get the largets share of the Open Office market?

Re:How many versions are there?

[demianme]

So, how many different variations of Open Office will there be out there? The IBM one, the Sun one, the various Linux distro versions, NeoOffice, etc. I am sure I have missed a few. I can't help thinking this is all diluting the presence of Open Office. Agreed

Re:How many versions are there?

[greenguy]

This is not a version of OOo, any more than Google Apps is. Rather, they are office suites that default to ODF. At worst, this is a lateral move (and the way IBM now sponsors two suites is mystifying). At best, this is the establishment of a whole ecosystem of ODF-centric software, which will thrive on its own internal competition, to the huge advantage of ODF users.

screenshots

[4play]

Lotus notes looks so much better than openoffice 2.3
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa documents
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_pe.jspa presentations
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_sse.jspa spreadsheets
hopefully this can help eat into Microsoft's market share in the office world.

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the ridiculous fixed-space Courier fonts everywhere? It looks like mid-80's era Windows 2.x...

Re:screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell uses a Serif font for their GUI? Worse, they took screenshots of it and put them on a public website! What are IBM thinking?

Just what are they trying to say? "Hey guys, check out our awful taste in typography!" I havn't seen anything that ugly since I accidentally caught a glimpse of one our developers using CDE.

Re:screenshots

[Plug]

The system font in the screenshots looks like an old bitmap font, probably used because it has lots of CJK characters in it. Seeing as the text is English, pity they didn't pick a nicer font for the system.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[tgatliff]

So I guess IBM promoting Linux had nothing to do with its increased use in the business server world? Also, so I guess no AIX code (IBM changes only) made it into Linux helping give it credability to most big business? IBM right now is OSS's friend. They know they have a monopolist that must be taken down, and for now the OSS world is aligned to help them with this goal.

As far as them picking the Lotus Symphony name.. To me, this is obvious. Open Office just has a "cheap feel" to it for most non-tech because money has never been spent building a brand. By adding the more mature Lotus name to it, many users will feel it is has more added value. From the OSS's perspective, it does not matter what the call it because it is GPL. Meaning, whatever changes their 35 programmers make, those changes will just be merged back into main Open Office anyway. The best of both worlds if you ask me..

Notes blows goats

[Legion303]

That's interesting news and all, but I wish they would throw those 35 developers at making Notes not suck first. You know your company's email standard is a piece of shit when you miss the "good old days" of Outlook.

code licensing

[brokeninside]

A large number of commercial products cannot be open sourced because they are built on top of proprietary libraries licensed from third parties. In fact, Star Office had a fair amount of such code that was pulled out before the source was released. If you go back to the early days of OpenOffice.org, you'll see how much work was put into reconstructing functionality that was removed before release of the code.

Most likely just a political move to back ODF

[Florian]

I would be surprised if any serious, long-term development effort would go into this. Most likely, it's a strawman product to show to the world that ODF is the standard format not only of OpenOffice and StarOffice, but also of "Lotus Symphony", making ODF look better on paper.

Re:Most likely just a political move to back ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has assigned 35 of their programmers to work on this full-time.

Free?

[mmcuh]

Will it be free, or just "free"? I can't find any information on that.

Re:Free?

[gauauu]

Yes, it will be free. Whether it will match your own preferred definition of free is another question. I prefer the definition as in "fat-free", as in "this product is Microsoft-Office-Free". So yes, it's free.

In other words: if you want them to clarify what they mean by free, maybe you should also.

Re:Free?

[sexybomber]

Considering that it's currently available for download here, that covers free as in beer. As for free as in freedom, I can't say, I don't see the source code there anywhere.

Re:Free?

[Risen888]

I couldn't find any info on that either, but presumably, as it is based on OpenOffice, it'll be GPL.

Re:Free?

[Anonymous Meoward]

Not quite one or the other. It will be 'free'.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[TheRaven64]

Also, so I guess no AIX code (IBM changes only) made it into Linux helping give it credability to most big business? No, none did. This was a huge point in the SCO case. IBM made sure no one from their AIX group worked on Linux. The version of JFS that was incorporated into Linux came from OS/2, not from AIX.

That said, the Xen guys at IBM have said that it helped them a lot being able to stroll down the corridor to the old mainframe guys and say 'hey, you remember that problem you had with your hypervisor 20 years ago? How did you solve it?'

the Notes 8 client without the Notes part

[dominux]

Notes 8 is a major architectural change for the Notes client, it is now presented through an Eclipse framework where it can live alongside other applications in the same Eclipse instance. The Notes 8 client has a bunch of "productivity editors" wordprocessor, presentation tool, spreadsheet, and these live in the same Eclipse instance as the regular Notes client bit. Symphony is the exact same code without the Notes client part. At the moment it is based on a fork of OpenOffice.org 1.x from before the SISL license change, however in the next release (or thereabouts) it will be based on a new LGPL cut of OpenOffice.org. This is really cool, it isn't quite competing with OpenOffice.org, improvements and contributions will flow in both directions. It is competing with Microsoft Office and the branding, packaging, support etc from IBM might go down quite well in some companies. I am not quite sure what the business model is for IBM, I guess they will do OK on the support and consultancy and it is a bit of a loss leader for the Notes client. Plus there is the bonus of screwing over Microsoft which has got to be worth a lot.

WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

This sounds great. I wonder if they would offer a WordPro import filter. At my company, they use Lotus Smartsuite (which includes WordPro) as the "official" office suite. Some people use Microsoft and a bunch of the IT folks (myself included) use OpenOffice.org. It would be great to get something which was basically OpenOffice.org, had corporate support backing (useful due to a co-worker/boss who thinks all freeware is inferior to payware by default), and could open our old WordPro documents.

Re:WordPro Filter

[metamatic]

My understanding is that there isn't any documentation for the WordPro format, other than the source code for WordPro. So while people have often requested WordPro import filters for various products, it has always been shot down as too expensive a proposition considering the very limited user audience. (I don't think WordPro ever got more than 2% market share.)

ODF is clearly the way forward, being supported by Symphony and Workplace as well as OpenOffice and KOffice.

(Opinions mine, not IBM's. I'm not in WordPro development, so the above is hearsay.)

Re:WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

My understanding is that there isn't any documentation for the WordPro format, other than the source code for WordPro.

This is one reason why "Lotus Symphony" gives me hope that there might be a WordPro import filter. Even if it was a proprietary, Symphony-only add-on it would help transition users from the awful WordPro program/format to the much better ODF.

Re:WordPro Filter

[metamatic]

I just downloaded Symphony, and it claims to be able to import Word Pro files.

I don't have any to test, though.

Re:WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

Thanks to beaverbrother's post, I was able to look up some of the specs on Lotus Symphony. It does look like they are claiming WordPro import support.

Quoting from http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_faqs_normandy.jspa#3 (emphasis mine):

Lotus Symphony Documents supports .doc (Microsoft), .dot (Microsoft template), .odt (ODF), .ott (ODF template), .sxw (IBM Lotus Symphony native format), .stw (IBM Lotus Symphony native format template), .lwp (IBM Lotus SmartSuite®), .mwp (IBM Lotus SmartSuite template), .rtf, and .txt formats

Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets supports .xls (Microsoft), .xlt (Microsoft template), .ods (ODF), .ots (ODF template), .sxc (IBM Lotus Symphony native format), .stc (IBM Lotus Symphony native format template), .123 (IBM Lotus Smartsuite), .12m (IBM Lotus Smartsuite template), .xml, and .csv formats

Lotus Symphony Presentations supports .ppt (Microsoft), .pot (Microsoft template), .odp (ODF), .otp (ODF template), .prz (IBM Lotus Smartsuite), .mas (IBM Lotus Smartsuite look template), .smc (IBM Lotus Smartsuite content template), .sxi (IBM Lotus Symphony native format), and .sti (IBM Lotus Symphony native format template)

I definitely have to download this and try it out now.

Re:WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

I have a few here that I can test when I get some free time.

Re:WordPro Filter

[Jason Levine]

I just installed it and tested it against a few WordPro files I had on hand. It seems to work, though there are occasional formatting glitches. I also like the interface.

Unfortunately, there are three things about it that I don't like. Every startup, it tries to add something to my startup routine. Even if I've already told Startup Monitor to allow it previously. It also takes a while to load up with no progress bar or other indicator. Finally, the install automatically makes Symphony your default ODF editor.

Given that it's beta, these aren't huge issues and could easily be fixed. If IBM improves the WordPro importing, I could definitely see recommending this to my company for use.

Re:WordPro Filter

[metamatic]

Well, I wouldn't hold out too much hope for the WordPro, for reasons I mentioned elsewhere in the discussion. I haven't noticed any startup issues myself, but then I run Linux.

I did get a massive boost in performance by replacing the bundled JVM with the OS one (Sun's).

Lotus SmartSuit

[Britz]

I thought they would freshen up the Lotus SmartSuit and release it for free. Now that would have been news. A new competitor on the market backed by a million dollar company.

But they will just rename OpenOffice.Org That won't change anything except maybe hurt the OpenOffice brand.

You did?

[CdBee]

What, even back in the 90s when you were doubtless running Mac System 8 or 9 on an IBM-fabbed PowerPC chip?

Another harpoon in Microsoft

[HangingChad]

IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project

This time a steely barb in another one of its profit centers. Microsoft is too fat to kill with a pointed stick but this will sting all the same.

Microsoft also stuck a harpoon in themselves with Vista. Something they've been doing a lot lately. Product activation, byzantine EULA's, where renting software isn't enough you also have to buy a license for your users to connect to it. Nevermind you paid for the server license, and paid for the client OS, you have to buy a freaking license to connect the two. And many act like this all okay somehow. It's freaking nuts.

35 developers helping out with OpenOffice is going to make a big difference. IBM lending credibility to OpenOffice will likely do a lot to enhance its image, regardless of whether they added any support staff.

Glad someone said it

[elrous0]

Openoffice is fine for a casual user, but once you "get beneath the hood" and start really getting into it, you realize it falls well short of MS Office. The last version of their Word knockoff I used was TERRIBLE for layout. Text boxes would end up in weird places, it couldn't seem to handle transparency in graphics, layering was hit-and-miss. Now 90% of users are never going to use these features, but MS Office has them there for the power users. That's what you get for your $300.

Re:Glad someone said it

[udippel]

The last version of their Word knockoff I used was TERRIBLE for layout

Thanks for confirming my suspicion. It has actually, always, been terrible for layout.
Makes one wonder, why someone spends US$300 for a layout-program on the dark side.

Oh, wait, you mean it is fantastic ?? Then I don't post any reply. Because neither OpenOffice nor MSOffice come any close to a layout program. You disqualified yourself, dear. Sorry.

Re:Glad someone said it

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, if you need to "get beneath the hood" in an office application, you are probably using the wrong tool for the job in the first place.

Re:Glad someone said it

[elrous0]

Actually, it's quite useful where I work. I often have to produce simple flyers that other people (non power users) can still edit easily. Now, I have Indesign and can do page layout in that, but no one is going to be able to easily edit the resulting pdf file. So I do them in Word. Everyone has Word, and even a moron can type in a text box or move a simple graphic element. Easy peasy.

Again, the features I'm talking about will never be used by 90% of users, but it's useful to have them there for us power users. That's the kind of thing that MS Office has that OpenOffice is spotty on.

Why based on OOo?

[Random832]

They should open-source 1-2-3 and AmiPro.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[iBod]

Yes Notes lives on - but it IS a REALLY, REALLY BAD application.

Lotus Notes is by far the worst piece of commercial software engineering I've seen in the corporate space, ever.

Nothing that has come out of Redmond even comes close to the lameness of Notes.

Visibility and discussion itself is good

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

As others post suggested and contradicted, IBM may or may not be trusted by corporations. Its execution could be very much ham handed or not. The ISO might yet fast track OOXML in Feb08, or not. Despite all that, the high profile discussions about the issue of file format compatibility, interoperability, archival endurance, upgrade treadmill, vendor lock etc itself will have some amount of good effect on the software world.

It could be that OpenOffice clearly lacks features. But that could be the effect not the cause. Because it does not have enough traction, not enough people are working on it to add features. Further one of MSFT's strategy is to bloat MS-Office with features mainly to claim this point. One must-have feature by one person in an important position is enough to thwart the adoption or stymie the feasibility studies of alternatives to MS-Office. With big names signing up and with corporations creating a second-source policy will put money on the table. That will attract developers and the lack features in the alternative office software will be remedied in time.

People know what happened when IE was left alone with no competition. The user base is more aware now a days. Further most developers have stopped trying to come up with the next killer application on the Windows platform. If they really come up with a real run away hit, MSFT will create a me-too app in the next release and usurp the market. So where is the incentive to create killer applications or run-away hits? That is one of the reasons why people looking to hit home runs look at the web not the stand alone PC.

Link to Website

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Symphony Page Its still the first beta so its probably a bit rough and you need an IBM ID to download it (freely available).

(AC to prevent Karma whoring)

A better punishment for MS

[aim2future]

"There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them."

A better punishment for Microsoft than paying 690 million dollars could be to let them convert all the world's documents being in MS proprietary formats into ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF). Otherwise the same mistake may be repeated when we have all forgotten...

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess Eclipse isn't good desktop software?

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[MemoryDragon]

IBM also has a history of successful products. Eclipse, WAS, WSAD, Lotus Notes, Rational Developer etc... The utterly failed in the office market with Lotus (They probably didnt have a clue on what to do with it)

No longer at the mercy of someone elses "vision"

[Per Abrahamsen]

Two nice things about basing their branded office package on an free software project is that

1) when "office applications" no longer are part of IBM's business strategy, users won't be entirely screwed, as they can switch to the main branch; and

2) when IBM re-re-re-adjust their vision to regain an interest in office applications, they are likely to be able to base their new offer on an updated application, rather than on technology that have been dormant since last they left it.

The only drawback for the provider (which also happens to be the biggest benefit for the customer) is that it is much harder to bind the customer to the provider than if you base your offering on proprietary technology. However, this drawback is only really significant for the market leader, for everybody else the best bet is to work together with a free software project as neutral ground.

Re:Is it?

[marcosdumay]

ISO still didn't lose its credibility.

They rejected OOXML on every stance (until now), remember?

Great, but...

[Cleon]

Well, yay for IBM, but don't you think they could put a few of those developers to use making Lotus Notes suck less?

Re:Great, but...

[Almahtar]

That may be exactly what they're doing.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[iBod]

>>Open Office just has a "cheap feel" to it

Is that improved by the 'Lotus' branding?

IBM's 'Lotus' desktop software has a reputation (among the devs who know) for cheap 'good enough' software engineering practices. I am privileged (sic) have seen the code for quite a lot of it, and it is a heap of bat shit ten miles high. Redmond's shittiest code shines like a beacon compared to it.

Have you ever USED Notes? It's an abomination, in every aspect!

IBM's corporate clients suck it down as it's a tiny footnote on their quarterly software bill for z/OS, CICS and DB2.

Not as lost as you might think

[Anonymous Coward]

There are so many people in high places out there who believe that Microsoft is THE COMPANY. NOTHING they can do can be wrong (where this is admitted, it's often "well, they are being honest" or "so? everyone makes mistakes" etc). ANY company daring to refuse the kool-aid is either

a) communist
b) jealous
c) killing MS for their own selfish reasons

IBM will be dissed widely amongst the "movers and shakers" in many companies and the effort not as effective as you have suggested.

Re:Not as lost as you might think

[unity100]

i dont think that among the "movers and shakers" there is a single one with a butt large enough to diss or dismiss ibm.

Whoope!

[WhiteWolf666]

The install base of the ODF format plus the user interface of Lotus Notes!

I can smell success!

(just a joke, I'm actually a fan of both :) )

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[iBod]

IBM also has a history of successful products. Eclipse, WAS, WSAD, Lotus Notes, Rational Developer etc... The utterly failed in the office market with Lotus (They probably didnt have a clue on what to do with it)

There, you defeated your own argument by saying Lotus Notes.

IMHO Eclipse is pretty awful too.

Lotus over MS

[Anonymous Coward]

We migrated away from MS Exchange/Outlook to Lotus Domino/Notes four years ago. There was lots of user hate and resentment, and much technical problems with buggy Lotus code for a long time, but now that we're at version 7.02, it's become a really stable and useful product. The application programmability, calendaring and workflow capabilities built into Notes completely blows away anything you can do in the MS Outlook world. We're using those features extensively now, whereas MS Outlook was simply just email and calendar only, not to mention being the biggest virus and malware magnet on the planet.

Getting into the MS Outlook world was like smoking crack (I wanna get real high, right f'ing now, I have no patience and I don't care how much it costs or how long the buzz lasts or how badly it trashes my health. Nothing else in the world matters).

Lotus Notes is like an old well-seasoned hippie farmer who carefully and craftily over the years has bred his own mega-strength pot, the best buds, in secret small batches in a basement hydroponics lab with grow lights, and slowly savors it one tasty little hit at a time, each of which blow your mind for all day long and won't kill you... at least not very fast anyway.

There you have it: MS is crack, Lotus is pot. This thread's done now.

Re:Lotus over MS

[iBod]

>>There was lots of user hate and resentment

Wow!

Now that's the way to serve your users!

LOL!

Re:Lotus over MS

[nostriluu]

>> but now that we're at version 7.02, it's become a really stable and useful product

Re:Lotus over MS

[y86]

I'm at 6.5 and it seems to work fine.

Notes does email, hosts databases for contact information, runs our item setup system and interfaces with our mainframe and a couple other systems.

What else can you want from a calendar/email client?

Re:Lotus over MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I think we work for the same company! Except we still hate it and have more bitter resentment toward those who mandated the change. We're also on version 7, but for whatever reason are still using the 6.5 mail template which is undeniably the root of all our UI hate. Version 8 is about six years too late and we are likely two years away from ever seeing it in production. There is lots of Notes kool-aid drinking at high levels.

I used to think MS products were bad, and then I was forced to use Notes.

Re:Lotus over MS

[Run4yourlives]

How about an email app that actually calls emails "emails" instead of "memos"?

How about archives that actually work?

How about attaching images in a way that doesn't embed them so as to be unreadable by other clients?

How about not having "Reply" and "Reply to all" as two separate buttons?

Need I continue?

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[iBod]

Well no!

I think Eclipse is a ghastly, awful, clunky horror, but some love it, I know.

Give me Visual Studio any day, or emacs.

You're crazy

[DogDude]

First off, please learn how to capitalize.

Secondly, Open Office is nowhere close to "critical mass", and they're certainly nowhere near de-facto. In order for either of those things to be true, lots of people have to be using said software. Open Office usage, in my experience, is virtually non-existent.

u r so right

[cinnamon colbert]

this is such a bad thing, adding a diff ver of OO, that it might actually be an effort to kill the project...just like linux killed itself with diff distros

you bet im crazy

[unity100]

remember, crazy people built our current technological infrastructure. you should be one too.

im not going to comment on the lack of foresight and vision in the latter parts of your comment.

Re:you bet im crazy

[DogDude]

It doesn't take any foresight or vision to say that "almost nobody is using Open Office right now". Foresight would be if I said "it's unlikely that many people will ever use Open Office".

Re:you bet im crazy

[unity100]

many people on this thread prove to the contrary.

Why

[demianme]

Why does IBM need to create there own office suite, they should just devote there time to OpenOffice

Re:Why

[Whatsisname]

Why don't you learn to spell?

The Novell Deal

[Tony]

Microsoft is not going to support ODF directly. They are paying other people to write ODF converters. This way, they save face. Microsoft wins.

Also, when the other filters imperfectly translate to/from OOXML, they can blame the makers of the ODF filters, rather than trying to come up with some lame half-assed excuse for imperfect document translation. And so people upgrade to the new MS-Office ("Now supports international standards!"), and they see that ODF documents "suck."

Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins. Microsoft wins.

Re:The Novell Deal

[apodyopsis]

You make a good point.

But it is irrelevant if, and only if, everybody is using ODF instead of OOXML. Certainly the numbers so far look promising in that respect.

I suspect it will boil down to a dirty war using three of MS favorite weapons - FUD, bad standards (only it can implement cleanly), and aggressive campaigning/lobbying.

They have rather deep pockets as companies go and a lot to lose if this does not go their way. On the plus side, the consumers (but this I mean business/Governments - not public) seem more wiser - or at least have smarter advisers - then in the past. Its going to be fascination to see how this pans out.

To MS a "standard" is nothing more then another legitimate business tactic.

Now that was a lengthy article

[MoreDruid]

all 12 lines of it...

my god journalism is getting pathetic

The proof is in the pudding.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I'm on OSX and when it comes out on OSX, I'll DL it and see if it is good enough. I'm hoping so... I'm SO sick of MSWord...

What could make it suck?

1. If it comes out on OSX, but requires X11.
2. If it has crapola text control, esp. orphan and widow control. MSWord completely sucks at that, so this should be a fairly easy target to beat.
3. If it doesn't have a keyboard command to import an image. MSWord AND PowerPoint don't and I HATE THAT. It is such a simple thing...
4. no support for pdf. I need pdfs for my work.
5. The presentation tool had best BLOW PowerPoint away. Completely. I hate using PPT, but my students have it, not Keynote, and there is no Keynote for Windows. Grrr...
6. The spreadsheet had better be MUCH easier to use than Excel. Again, that can't be hard, because Excel oozes puss.

Any of the above would make it suck for me.

That said, I am looking forward to working with it to see how it goes.

RS

Re:The proof is in the pudding.

[Blakey Rat]

Dude, have you tried IBM Lotus Notes for Mac?

I can practically guarantee it will suck. It will make the Windows UI look good, and the Windows UI sucks. Prepare for random crashes. Get ready for bloated, super-slow performance. Welcome to the land of UI elements with really teeny fonts, but you can't change the font size.

It'll suck.

Re:The proof is in the pudding.

[mini me]

4. no support for pdf. I need pdfs for my work.

I haven't used Office for OS X, so I'm genuinely curious as to why the print to PDF feature that is available in virtually every OS X application does not work? Not to mention that Quartz based applications (which includes Office, apparently) are stored in PDF format before they hit your screen. It would be impossible to use Office for OS X without PDF support.

Re:The proof is in the pudding.

[mla_anderson]

Have you tried NeoOffice on Mac?

Re:The proof is in the pudding.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

No, I haven't. Thanks for the link! I'll check it out!

RS

Another turkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't IBM already own an office suite which failed in the marketplace?

Must be nice to be a company like IBM and not have to worry about, you know, making products which are ecomically viable. Feels like 1998 all over again! It's a whole new paradigm shifting new economy paradigm!

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[MemoryDragon]

Depends on what you want to do with Eclipse, Eclipse has become defacto base for most Java IDEs for a reason, as Java IDE it is top notch. As C++ IDE it might be bad, but Eclipse really is successful for a reason, because it is excellent for its core job.

Meanwhile

[Fnord666]

Meanwhile the Italian labor union RSU is planning a virtual protest in response to pay negotiations that might result in an employee pay cut. The protest is currently planned for 9/25 at IBM's corporate campus in Second Life. Hopefully someone will youtube some of the action.

Re:Meanwhile

[Just Some Guy]

The protest is currently planned for 9/25 at IBM's corporate campus in Second Life.

That is, quite likely, the stupidest thing I will have read all week.

Re:Meanwhile

[forgotten_my_nick]

As soon as you get to 50 protesters everyone else will be locked out of that area because SL can't scale.

Also SL for the most part is a ghost town and IBM are working on their own virtual world. You have a better chance of being seen in that one (which is internal afair).

1GB RAM minimum? Forget it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the system requirements:

* Lotus Symphony supports both Microsoft Windows® and Linux® platforms.

Note: Be sure your system meets these client system requirements:

* Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5
* 900MB disk space minimum
* 1GB RAM memory minimum
* US English locale

None of my home machines have that much RAM. Fortunately, StarOffice works fine on my 512MB boxes. (Yes, RAM is cheap, but I'm cheaper.)

Re:Is it?

[SoulRider]

You got that wrong, MS lost a lot more credibility with their shenanigans. Instead of creating a viable standard to present to the standards board they tried to subvert the whole standards process. I bet that instead of revising the OOXML standard to be viable they are trying to think up other ways to subvert the process. MS will never get it.

Linux beta version installation

[frobisch]

The installation in vnc and with xfce as window manager was not very smooth. There were no scripts created to call the installed applications under /opt/ibm/lotus/Symphony and the graphical installer refused to run in vnc (no display issues), but it has a '-console' switch. There are 3 .desktop files created by the installer under /usr/share/applications and with the help of them you can create scripts something like the following to start the programs:

#!/bin/bash
# start Symphony Documents Beta
# taken from /usr/share/applications/Lotus Symphony Documents.desktop
/opt/ibm/lotus/Symphony/framework/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.standalone.addin_3.0.0.20070913-1045/apps/Lotus\ Symphony\ Documents "$@"

Release your documents under ODF

[Anonymous Coward]

"And ODF is looking to be positioned to be just that."

Regular people can do their part to help ODF become a de facto standard as well. What I did is release all my 'book warez' in the ODF format, there are macros to do various formats -> ODF quite easily.

Another thing I am going to do is when replying to job advertisements that ask for .DOC, I'll tell them about ODF.

Reg. free link

[lsetia]

oh wait..

No OS X support?

[Anonymous Coward]

this will be on my christmas wish list.

Requirements

[christurkel]

This is not a lightweight app.

Lotus Symphony supports both Microsoft Windows® and Linux® platforms. Note: Be sure your system meets these client system requirements: * Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista * Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5 * 900MB disk space minimum * 1GB RAM memory minimum * US English locale

No Mac OS X support.

Re:Requirements

[mapinguari]

Good god! RedHat5? That's gotta be 10 years old. They should really do themselves a favor and support 5.2

Re:Requirements

[rumith]

No Mac OS X support. However, it is planned:

Future, support is currently planned for the Apple Macintosh platform.

This seems to have become a MS bashing session...

[Big wet dog]

So, as someone who runs an IT shop for a non-profit, I thought I'd mention MS's pricing for non-profits:

Office Professional = $20
SQL Server 2005 = $240
Small Business Server 2003 = $68
All of their products are available to non-profits at similar discounts at TechSoup.
http://www.techsoup.org/stock/Category.asp?catalog_name=TechSoupMain&category_name=Microsoft&Page=1

And of course Bill Gates will give more money to non-profits then everyone who has ever posted on Slashdot x100.

I'm not saying competition isn't bad, I'm just saying...

Fundamental OOo inadequacies

[zooblethorpe]

"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."

People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not.

I'll back it up. How's this bug for starters. It's been on the tracker for over four years. It covers the basic fundamental functionality of counting words and characters in a word processor document. Anyone who writes / edits / translates professionally needs this to work well, simply, and accurately -- and OOo simply doesn't measure up.

I know -- I translate for a living, and I *very* much would like to be able to use OOo as my primary office software solution. But I cannot do so, as I need accurate counts that break down Western and Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK, i.e. double-byte) character counts. MS Word has done this for a long time, at least since around 1998. And yet despite reporting this bug and detailing what needs to happen, the OOo dev team still has not even acknowledged the CJK issue, let alone set a specific target milestone.

Try it yourself. Open MS Word in one window, copy or type in a paragraph or three. Copy the same text to an OOo Writer window. Run the word count function in both apps, and compare. Pitiful. And even worse if your sample text includes any CJK text.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo...

This isn't an issue of training. This is an issue of "room for improvement". In this case, enough room to park a semi, complete with an enormous, though ignored and weatherbeaten, sign right next to the gaping hole in the wall, saying "PUT GARAGE DOOR HERE".

Whoa!

[loki.jf]

I just saw a chair fly by!

Re:Whoa!

[rastos1]

Yeah, I confirm sightings in Central Europe.

Competitor emulation = inferior software.

[Kadin2048]

I turned a friend onto OO.o a couple of years ago. He used it for about a year, then went back to Office. He said he gave it a shot, but just couldn't get comfortable with it. To me, that is an HONEST assessment. I don't buy the blanket argument that OO.o is "just as good". MS Office is the leader, they have to be knocked off... it has to be proven, most likely repeatedly, that OO.o is just as good if not better. Hopefully with someone like IBM behind it, it can get a foothold in the business world. You can reach a lot of people that way. The problem, as I see it, is that OpenOffice spends an inordinate amount of time trying to be Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint. That's not a recipe for success. No matter how hard they try, they're never going to be MS Word. And to a certain extent, I think there's a sort of "uncanny valley" for software: if you make a piece of software that tries to feel like something else, and you get 99% of the way there, the 1% will drive people nuts. Sometimes it's better just to go for compatibility and stop trying to emulate the other guy.

What I'm a little disappointed in is that there isn't more emphasis on doing things better than Word. If you look at the places where other OSS software has succeeded, it's generally because the software is just honestly better at something than the commercial/closed-source competition, not just because the OSS one happens to be free of cost. Linux gets used a lot by industry because it's a good server platform, and for many years was a lot more stable and had a lot more features that Windows (arguably both are still true but I don't want to get into a discussion of it). The purchase price of software is a very small factor in most people's decisions to use it, as it should be.

I think Apple does a fairly good job of this; at least philosophically (their execution sometimes stumbles). You don't see them trying to doggedly emulate Excel in Numbers. It's generally compatible with Excel, and they tout this as a feature, but then they seem to have sat down and said "what can we beat Excel at?" And so it has a much slicker interface, produces nicer charts, etc. And it's adoption rate is faster than Calc's (although it's limited only to Mac users so the market it can hope to grab is smaller).

As long as a project has as its aim the emulation of an existing piece of software, it's always going to be burdened with an inferiority complex. And users may not totally understand that, but they'll sense it, and in many cases decide that they want the "real thing" even if it costs them extra.

Re:Competitor emulation = inferior software.

[gosand]

Sometimes it's better just to go for compatibility and stop trying to emulate the other guy. ... What I'm a little disappointed in is that there isn't more emphasis on doing things better than Word.

Well, for one thing, Word is not a bad piece of software. Things could be improved, but you can't make something radically different if you are going after Word users. So it needs to be similar enough that people will want to use it, and innovative enough that it will make people like it better. That is a pretty tall order considering how ingrained Office has become. You have a large diverse user-base, from businesses to the average home user. So do you make it have features like built-in versioning/change controls/security/advanced features that businesses would like, or go for "get the basic simple stuff done well" that the home user would like?

I am not saying it is impossible, but I think it is really difficult. Linux has taken off for the reasons you state - it is different from Windows. But to be honest, there aren't a lot of converts from Windows to Linux. And I think that is OK, to be honest. I think there is room for Windows/Mac/Linux/other in the OS world. I also think there is room for another Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Presentation/etc. in the market. "taking on" Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc is the trap that people fall into, and I think it is why MS has maintained its hold on that space. It's tough - you can't really go into it with that mindset, or you are just an imitator. But you can't ignore it, because the situation does exist, and MS will do whatever it can to crush any challenger.

User resentment

[Anonymous Coward]

The switch from MS Exchange/Outlook was *ordered* by upper management. The users had no choice in the decision. They were ordered to use Lotus, and make themselves learn it or else they could choose not to have email at all... and since using email was part of their job assignments, the effective choice was use Lotus and learn to like it, or you can quit your job and go elsewhere. They learned Lotus alright, and over time the vast majority of them have stopped being malcontents and are actually liking Lotus, especially the Domino Web Access and the much better calendar features that Lotus has over Outlook since our business organization thrives on our customized calendar apps. Lotus's shared document libraries and teamroom databases have become a big hit too.

Re:User resentment

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, what a sad story.

Lotus Notes is an abomination. I might have been "great" 10 years ago but right now it just looks old and tired.
Document libraries and teamrooms are the clunkiest things compared to modern wikis.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Just Some Guy]

Office Professional = $20
SQL Server 2005 = $240
Small Business Server 2003 = $68

OpenOffice Extreme Ultimate Edition: Free.
PostgreSQL: Free.
Every popular network daemon ever written plus the platform it was probably written on: Free.
Realizing that you're running a smaller version of the platform that powers Google and you didn't pay a dime for it: priceless.

For playing video games, there's Windows. For everything else, there's Unix.

So, if any of those IBM devs are reading this

[cellocgw]

Please, dear new OpenOffice developer, add the equivalent of Normal View (OO.o issue 4914 IIRC) to Writer. I've been waiting years for this, and it's clear from the comments at that issue that many others recognize the need for this view option.

No coffee yet

[Darth Hubris]

I read the stub of the article, and saw the "ooo" tag and thought it meant "Ooooh!". Have funny, now. Need. Coffee.

Re:No coffee yet

[Anonymous Coward]

If it helps, it runs on Eclipse, which runs on Java...

IBM, UBM, We All BM for ... never mind.

[Jane Q. Public]

That was a great thing for them to do. That may be the push everything needed. Very smart move on their part.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And of course Bill Gates will give more money to non-profits then everyone who has ever posted on Slashdot x100."

So what? It's ill-gotten gains. And the whole edifice is maintained by deception and intrigue.

If a mugger gave away some of what he'd purse-snatched from a little old lady would that make him morally superior to a Slashdot poster? Would a judge think so?

Lotus Notes users receive it free?

[vistic]

"Reuters is reporting that IBM plans to announce a free, downloadable office suite today... There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free."

So it's free for everyone, including Lotus Notes users? What's the point of mentioning that then?

Start it in Google Docs...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I.B.M. is also joining forces with Google, which offers the open-source desktop productivity programs as part of its Google Pack of software. Google supports the same document formats in its online word processor and spreadsheet service." - Times article

"Google Launches Powerpoint Competition" - Slashdot http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1233217

Seems like the perfect complements to each other. Maybe they should add Google style collaboration to Lotus Symphony and make it really easy.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Big wet dog]

The prices I mentioned, when you take into consideration the real costs of software (installation, maintenance, integration, training, productivity, etc), is 'free'. But clearly you wouldn't understand that since you think Windows is best for gaming.

Wikis...

[Anonymous Coward]

...are toys. They're ok for "entertainment-ware" on the public Internet, but since there is no mechanism for digital certificate based security controls, no built-in audit trails, etc. Sure you could put that into a Wiki if you wanted to code it all from scratch, but then just why not have a team of developers custom write everything in raw C. Lotus has it all there in an off-the-shelf package that comes with a support contract from a renowned vendor. Big business buys off the shelf software and services from approved well-established vendors. Small potatoes individuuals and tiny businesses might like the "roll yer own" open source stuff but it just doesn't fit into the "enterprise" model.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Just Some Guy]

Windows now installs, maintains, integrates, and trains itself? That's bad news for everyone who's been saying that all platforms have those costs.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Big wet dog]

If a mugger gave away some of what he'd purse-snatched from a little old lady would that make him morally superior to a Slashdot poster? Would a judge think so?
Oh brother

Yeah, Bill Gates (and Warren Buffett since he's given Gates a ton of his billions) is really just a mugger stealing from little old ladies.

Sheesh

Thanks for the link -- Slashdot Comments at work!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, this story is on every news outlet in America. Wall Street Journal, etc. Yet I had to come to the Slashdot comments to actually find the download link. IBM's website is byzantine. Haven't they ever heard of putting a link on the front page of IBM.com for big news items?

This is not the first time I couldn't find a link for something IBM related. When they pushed out DB2 Express, it took forever to find that link at the time.

I don't trust IBM

[JamesP]

After Clearcase, Lotus stuff and other irRational crap, my respect for IBM is ZERO

Sorry, I'll stick with MS on that.

Re:I don't trust IBM

[geekoid]

Clearcase? Clearcase rocks. What's your problem with it?

Re:I don't trust IBM

[JamesP]

Ha! I hope you're not trolling.

Price (too much), performance (or lack of), features (no support for changesets), speed (today, 4 min to checkin about 4k of data)

Pretty much all others VCSs wipe the floor with it.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[ErikZ]

Of course it's best for gaming. That's why it's used in MS's Xboxes.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Big wet dog]

Windows now installs, maintains, integrates, and trains itself?Windows now installs, maintains, integrates, and trains itself?

I did not say this. I clearly stated the obvious, that software installs have costs beyond the cost of 'free' which seemed to be your original bottom line.

Now, if you can show corporate America how it can save money going to your 'free' stacks you will be a rich man.

Otherwise, I've wasted enough time with you.

Re:Oh God Puhleeeze! Not the LOTUS xxx brand!

[Blakey Rat]

Amen.

Lotus Notes is a classic example of a developer team that, simply put, does not get it.

Users complain that it's terrible at email; Notes devs answer that it's not designed to do email. Users ask "then why does IBM sell it as an Outlook replacement?" (No answer.) Users ask why the "out of office" feature doesn't work half the time, and they start talking about "replication", "databases", etc. The developers are so out-of-touch with the common computer user, it's like they're aliens or something.

IBM's plan of operation with Notes seems to be to sell Notes/Domino to a business along with a suite of "solutions" (all implemented as Lotus Notes databases.) Then when the business's users complain about how crappy it is, to sell them "consulting" at hugely inflated rates to fix the problems that should have been fixed ten years ago.

You might complain that Exchange/Outlook sucks, but it works out-of-the-box much better than Notes, and it costs half as much per-seat.

(Can you tell I had to work helpdesk at a IBM shop?)

Oh, and memo to IBM: It doesn't count as a "web app" if it relies on Java to do ANYTHING, even a basic menu which would easily be implemented in Javascript.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Just Some Guy]

I clearly stated the obvious, that software installs have costs beyond the cost of 'free' which seemed to be your original bottom line.

So if you're going to have those costs anyway, then it makes sense to eliminate the initial overhead that would ordinarily be added to them. Great - we're in agreement!

Now, if you can show corporate America how it can save money going to your 'free' stacks you will be a rich man.

I'm not that clever, but IBM seems to be doing a pretty good job of it.

Re:Is it?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I respectfully disagree. I don't think Microsoft ever had much credibility to lose here: it's not like their business motive to attempt subversion of the ISO process is questionable, nor their tactics unexpected. The fact that ISO avoided such subversion more by luck than judgement is the unfortunate thing here.

Lotus Notes and Linux

[misterfalcon]

Lotus Notes has a Linux client starting with Notes 7 and continuing in Notes 8. The Linux client for Notes 8 was released the same time as the Windows version.

formula error

[synapse7]

OO values blank cells as 0 and formulas come out happy. Symphony interprets blank cells as null and formulas die. I played with it for as long as it took to download the newest OO and couldn't find a way to change blank cell evaluation. Anybody else deal with this... If I were to try it again, would I need to insert a 0 in every blank cell that is part of a formula...

Re:formula error

[Mode_Locrian]

I think it would be better to interpret blank cells as null, actually (if you interpret blanks as zeros, that could really bork your calculation of (e.g.) the average of a data set). Better, I think, to write your formulas with a clause to handle what to do if the referenced cell is blank. I don't know how to do this in Symphony, but I bet it's similar to what you can do in Excel: =IF(ISBLANK(myCell),"",$formula).

Word counts some punctuation as "words"...

[Physics Dude]

Try it yourself. Open MS Word in one window, copy or type in a paragraph or three. Copy the same text to an OOo Writer window. Run the word count function in both apps, and compare. Pitiful. And even worse if your sample text includes any CJK text.

I just tried this using the first paragraph from your post and found that they did report different numbers of words, but that Microsoft Office was counting some punctuation (the slashes and double hyphens) as words while OpenOffice didn't.

Personally I don't consider "/ / --" to be three words.

Maybe they should have different modes for how to count, but IMHO OpenOffice is the one that got this correct. I haven't tried OOo 2.3 with CJK text, but at least for English, IMHO it's Word 2003 that has the bug and OOo that is more accurate.

...but OOo doesn't count CJK correctly *at all*

[zooblethorpe]

While I generally agree about the punctuation issue, there are fringe cases where this is actually more useful, particularly in translation. Say for instance the source text has "-->" (minus the quotes), and the client expects proper arrows in the target text -- that winds up being, for all intents and purposes, a "word" that needs translating. But I'll be first to admit that's not the usual case. :)

Part of my beef about shortcomings on OOo's part regarding Western text is the lack of data found in the Count dialog. MS Word shows us counts for:

• Pages
• Words
• Characters (no spaces)
• Characters (with spaces)
• Paragraphs
• Lines
• Non-Asian words
• Asian characters, Korean words

Meanwhile, OOo's dialog gives us only:

• Words
• Characters

OOo doesn't give any indication of how many of those characters might be whitespace. Nor do we get any other stats about the document, like number of pages or paragraphs. Sure, we could go to File -> Properties -> Statistics for that as well, but if folks are bothering to imitate MS Word's UI for the sake of user familiarity, why are they only going halfway and leaving out some of the useful bits?

Once we get into CJK text, OOo counts get really silly. Take for example the first paragraph from the Japanese Wikipedia article on Eleanor Roosevelt. It's nice and short, and includes some mixed Western + CJK text. Simply given the more robust stats available on the Word Count dialog, you might expect more and more accurate info from MS Word -- and you'd be right.

MS Word gives us a "Non-Asian words" count of 11, and an "Asian characters, Korean words" count of 71. OOo, meanwhile, gives us the completely spurious "Words" count of 41, and an unhelpful "Characters" count of 116. Japanese does not have a clear linguistic sense of "word" for counting purposes, not least because they don't generally use any spaces on the one hand, while on the other there's little agreement as to whether particles should be considered suffixes or separate words in their own right. So any "word count" for Japanese is silly right off the bat. Never mind that Japanese folks themselves only ever count Japanese texts by the number of non-space characters.

Not distinguishing between Japanese and Western words and characters is another strike against OOo, as I cannot tell how many words in a mixed-text document might already be in English and therefore not need translating. Since most clients ask for billing based either on the number of Asian non-space characters in the source, or the number of English words translated (i.e. target Western word count - source Western word count), OOo is useless to me in this regard.

So sure, while MS Word's count might be flawed, it's still a far cry better than what OOo offers.

Cheers,

NeoOffice?

[cheros]

There is a version of OpenOffice.org ("OO") that uses the beautiful graphic elements of the Mac interface called Neo Office. I don't have a Mac, but I use OO on both Windows and Linux (with less and less taking place on Windows).

I've been using OpenOffice.org since version 1, and I'm quite happy with it. More importantly, very few people seem to notice that I'm using it so the compatibility isn't as big a deal as they want you to believe.

Just give it a try, it's not like it costs anything :-).

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[geekoid]

Your just saying what?
Melinda starts a charity organization and therefore MS products are better? That people have to give more money then Bill Gates to have a valid opinion?

You can do more for free with OO products. So if MS lowers the price to Zero, and then improves them substantially you might have a point. You are doing a dis-service to your clients. Probably because you can't do anything with out a wizard, or an easy example on Google, but the was an Ad Hominum, so I won't use that as a logical point.Jerk.

I'm just saying.

Macs Excluded

[wintermute1974]

The beta site does not include an Apple Mac OS X version.
https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html

Slashdot won't let facts get in the way of a story

[The Monster]

It doesn't matter. The story submitter put two and two together, came up with 22, and the editors ran with it.

Just like the US and Iran/Iraq

[Professor Fate]

First we don't like Iran, so we help Saddam.

Then we don't like Saddam, so we give help to Iran.

I think we went back and forth a few more times. Right now, I think we like Iraq(the government anyway) and hate Iran.

I hated IBM but they haven't annoyed me for a while. I'm happy to use them against MS. :)

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Almahtar]

And of course Bill Gates will give more money to non-profits then everyone who has ever posted on Slashdot x100. Doesn't change the fact that the money he's putting into those NPOs came from illegal business practices. He can't possibly give enough to charities to redeem his image in my eyes - it's all effectually stolen money.

As a former OS/2 user from the 1990s...

[theurge14]

...those screenshots of "IBM Lotus Symphony" make me shudder. After all these years IBM still can't seem to find a single competent UI designer in their entire gigantic organization. What is that, Courier New on the tabs and widgets? And it looks like IBM is announcing their brand new version of Office 97.

Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather pay the money for something a little less 10-years ago, like iWork '08.

Re:As a former OS/2 user from the 1990s...

[ShinmaWa]

What is that, Courier New on the tabs and widgets? That font is on the Windows menu bar and widgets. Whoever took the screenshots seemed to have made Courier part of their Windows theme, for whatever reason. The font is not a part of the product itself.

ODT compatibility looks like a "free inclusion"

[HiThere]

Since this suite is based around ODT, that means that OOo files will be compatible. Seems good to me.

Yes, it's quite probable that the "Enterprise Version" will have additional capabilites that aren't free. But compatibility will be free. Just not the added features. It doesn't matter to me if you need to pay extra for non-standard features, or for IBM support. Those both sound fair. (I'll probably decide that I don't need their extra features and support...I've done so since they dropped "VisualAge for Java". Proprietary tie-ins are just too unreliably subject to discontinuance.)

But ODT support is worth a lot! If I never use their software, it's still worth a lot to me, because it means I can send document to those who *DO* use their software.

Not Free Software

[Munchkinguy]

IBM has an interesting license agreement on this software. You must agree not to redistribute, reverse-engineer, etc., EXCEPT for the non-IBM components (there's a long list of them). I'm not sure Lotus Symphony complies with all of the OSI-approved licenses of the software that it is made from.

Lotus Notes 7.02 for Mac....

[BBCWatcher]

....is actually quite good. It's a universal application, and it doesn't spin up the rainbow beach ball too often. It doesn't seem particularly demanding of memory. You can adjust the fonts, both using a menu from within Notes itself or by editing the now plain text INI file. (You had to download a separate IBM utility to edit the Notes 6.x for Mac proprietary binary INI file previously.)

The only feature gaps that I've found are the lack of Java support (not a problem for me) and a paucity of built-in file attachment viewers. If your Notes server is set up to handle attachment viewing on behalf of the client then it's not a problem. Of course opening the file, using whatever preferred application you wish, is still an option.

Installed Base

[BBCWatcher]

I didn't write the Wall Street Journal article, but I would assume the 135 million figure is significant because it refers to a large installed base that will get Open Document Format support. The fact Lotus Symphony is now available as a free download is wonderful and will add to ODF's marketshare, but it isn't the whole story.

OMG it's Lotus Ami-Pro and 1-2-3! (But no ponies)

[X'16435934]

I remember this crappy Office suite from the 1990s (and earlier)

I said then that IBM should stick to hardware and leave the software to MS and others.
Now I can even say "Stay out of hardware too, you dorks!"
(And hardware wasn't even exactly their strong point back in the '60s, '70s and '80s)

Too bad that all the soul-patched ponytailed newbie nerds don't remember bad ol' IBM days.
...the MS of its day, that deserved to die before year 2000.
LOL! Next they'll be announcing that they are "gluing" Apache onto Domino and making it open also.
Die, IBM! DIE!

Migod! Is IBM Dracula? Where is that binary stake?


Alas, drunken on Pinoqachole again...

Re:Ms, your case is lost Open Office enhancements

[lsatenstein]

I see a few areas where IBM can make good contributions. One is with sound and webcam integration with the equivalent of power-point. I would like to be able to have a powerpoint and in one frame, show a video.

The other area where OO lacks is in a good grammar checker. Until one is developed, I use MS word. Actually, I find MS word file sizes to be half those for the same OO file.

The grammar checker is for the english guy like me who has to write in French or Spanish. I need the conjugation's to be correct, and the accents too.

And if you're neither a student nor a non profit?

[theolein]

Your post is very possibly an attempt at subterfuge, and thereby trolling. POsting the prices of MS Office for non profits is rather silly when most people work for profit.

I own Windows XP OEM and Office 2003 Professional and I paid around $800 for them here in Switzerland. I only bought Office for the very reason that ODF exists: compatibility with customers and my workplace. It has paid off and I'm not complaining, but I could have used that money on better things. I think ODF and Open Office is a step in the right direction.

Re:And if you're neither a student nor a non profi

[Big wet dog]

Your post is very possibly an attempt at subterfuge, and thereby trolling. POsting the prices of MS Office for non profits is rather silly when most people work for profit.
When the vast majority of posts are basically just calling MS evil it is *not* silly nor trolling to show they have a good side. That's all I was trying to do. In my opinion, it is much more silly to offhandedly just call a company 'evil' (which you did not do, but is the general tone of many posts).

It has paid off and I'm not complaining, but I could have used that money on better things. I think ODF and Open Office is a step in the right direction.
This is the only reasonable response I've gotten to my post and would agree with these sentiments 100%.

Re:This seems to have become a MS bashing session.

[Big wet dog]

Your just saying what?
I thought I was pretty clear; MS and Bill Gates give generously to non-profits.

Clear enough yet?

You can do more for free with OO products.
That's fine. Like I told an earlier poster, go out and *prove* this to the many billion dollar companies running MS and you will be a rich man.

Jerk.
My post was factual (MS gives discounts to non-profits and Bill Gates will give away more money than anyone in the history of mankind). This makes me a 'jerk' only to people too emotionally vested in some mental tech dogma they have chosen.

I forgot to mention, why OO is more innovative

[aim2future]

OpenOffice has at least five clear innovative advantages over MS Office.

1. It uses a more modern business model
   free software => free unlimited innovation possible
2. OpenOffice uses ODF which is a multi-platform ISO standard instead of that OOXML crap.
   => you can exchange documents between many different platforms.
3. It runs natively on GNU/Linux, Mac, Solaris, (soon FreeBSD) and many other systems, no need for e.g. Wine.
4. It can generate LaTeX, which is good when you want to make a professional publishing of your text.
5. OO can generate PDF natively even though I rarely use this option as the generated PDF files are too big.
   I use to print to PS and then run ps2pdf instead

Take care with your Linux Distros for install !

[udippel]

I downloaded the 200+ MB looking forward to test it on Debian Etch.
It doesn't install !!
Actually, it seems to fail the install except on the SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5 mentioned in the FAQ.
This behaviour is known:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/supportThread.jspa?messageID=4437&#4437