IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o

eldavojohn writes "It's frequent that we hear of a country or city or company switching from Windows to Linux, but it's rare that we hear of one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) over MS Office, and also to use the Open Document Format when saving files. The change has been mandated to take place in the next 10 days. Of course, they are doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft. With i4i stirring stuff up against MS Office and absolving OO.o from litigation, are we on the verge of a potential break from Microsoft's dominant document suite? Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony."

Comments

OOoh

[Anonymous Coward]

O_oo

OpenOffice variant?

[93 Escort Wagon]

In the old days, years before OpenOffice or even StarOffice existed, Lotus Symphony was an office suite. So unless this is another "SBC buys AT&T and then starts calling itself AT&T", how can Symphony be described as a variant of OpenOffice in any way, shape, or form?

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Trepidity]

IBM discontinued the original Symphony suite in 1992, but revived the name in 2007 for their OO.o variant. Apart from being an office suite from IBM, it's not related to the 1980s/early-90s Symphony.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously because they said so, and no one cares.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Trepidity]

Err, correction--- Lotus discontinued the Lotus Symphony suite in 1992, a few years before being bought by IBM in 1995. When IBM bought Lotus (mainly to get Lotus Notes), they also got all the trademarks, and I guess a decade later decided to resurrect one of them. Either way, the current Symphony isn't code-wise related to the old one.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[CarpetShark]

Because it is. IIRC, they basically ported OpenOffice to the Eclipse platform.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Hurricane78]

Lotus then created SmartSuite. My favorite office suite off all times, up until now! I wait until something like the InfoBox, but with full keyboard control, is available again. For now, the new Symphony is still far away from that. And it still thinks that default/pure menu bars and button bars make sense nowadays. (Face it: They are an outdated concept.)

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[contrapunctus]

And IBM made it so registration is required to download. I'm not sure what Symphony adds to Openooffice.org that having to give IBM my name/email is worth it.

I tried it on a (to be reformatted) computer a while ago and if I remember, there were features/buttons taken out (can't remember what but I couldn't use it because of it, sorry I can't remember).

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Runaway1956]

I don't much care what they call it, as long as it isn't made by MS. Sweet story!!

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[oldhack]

"Real hackers hack brains! Real tinkerers tune their body! Computers are for n00bs. ;)"

Sounds like an image-obsessed marketing hack. The hot ones are worth the trouble, though, I guess.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than some addons (fonts, templates), there are two primary advantages that Symphony and StarOffice (Sun's commercial offering of OOo [1]) have over the open source version, and for most individuals, they are not that big a deal.

The first is commercial support. If a business has some problem (usage, program issue), an office suite is a core to productivity. Having support for both questions and in case of something happeninging is vital.

The second is legal CYA. If a business is using a commercial product and something happens, they can just point at their support contracts, and tell people to go blame the vendor. Without this, if an incident happens (leakage of information, mass data loss), there is no "due diligence", and the buck will stop with the company, opening them up to civil lawsuits and criminal investigation, especially if under laws like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or other regulations.

[1]: Technically Openoffice.org came from StarOffice.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[contrapunctus]

Thank you, very informative.
I asked with an individual's point of view (as opposed to a business's) and didn't consider busnisses. And you showed me the narrow perspective I was using :)
I guess with a name like IBM backing the software, IT departments probably feel more comfortable recommending it.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[bth]

Lotus Symphony also reads some of the old Lotus Smartsuite formats, at least the last generation of them (like .123). I realize this isn't a big deal for most individuals, but in an organization that still has old Smartsuite files floating around, it is useful.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[m.ducharme]

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM..."

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain hackers wouldn't have the technology to do in such an advanced way as today so without electronic engineers, as robotic arms are much steadier and are able to move in a finer way than human hands, and can be controlled remotely. Body hackers wouldn't have the best shoes and equipment at cheap prices without electronic engineers, cause they'd have nowhere to run simulations and store data very quickly. Computers are for people who want to make a lasting impact in their genre, regardless as to their actual financial "success", rather than have a couple number one singles.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[wvmarle]

What do we care?

They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.

The real point here is what EVERYBODY misses and that is that they are mandating saving in Open Document Format. That's what's important. They are a major company and they are now supporting an open format, which has by now maybe a dozen word processors supporting it.

For what I am concerned they continue using MS Word in half of their business, and save the documents in ODF. Then people who have some special needs can take their special-needs-word processor and have no problems with compatibility. Linux/Mac users are also happy. Maybe there are Solaris users around even - they will be happy not having to boot Windows just to read an e-mail attachment.

Remember folks, it's the use of open standards that counts. Not the actual implementation - as long as that implementation is correct and follows the standard well, I'm happy. MS Word's lock-in with its doc format is the problem, not MS Word as such.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[rtb61]

The single biggest advantage of Lotus Symphony, it provides choice, now you can choose from four different versions of Open Office and still have full document compatibility and operating system choice.

It might be viewed as a new corporate status symbol, if you are really significant in the technology sector you produce your own document compatible fork of open office under you own branding and demonstrate your capabilities that to the general public. A way of reminding your employees of the value of the products they produce and putting an end to them staring at the competitors logo.

This sort of corporate identity creation and branding has a significant impact on the way the public views a company, even major hardware players might start making the shift and supply their computers with their branded office suit, browser et al. With open source the investment needed to achieve that is minimal, especially compared to the marketing advantage that can be gained in highlighting the value of their hardware product and the full range of software tools they provide with it all included in the price.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[IntlHarvester]

This sort of corporate identity creation and branding has a significant impact on the way the public views a company,

Good point! Have you ever heard of a Lotus shop where the end users don't spit bile at IBM? ;)

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[oatworm]

I was fired for buying IBM, you insensitive clod!

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[BrokenHalo]

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM..."

Back in the early '80s I worked a couple of contracts at a certain large Burroughs site in London where a jumped-up middle-manager did indeed get fired for buying IBM. He thought he was trying to "make his mark" and bring the company into the real world. As it was, he managed to find out something about the Real World of unemployment queues in Thatcher's Britain - which is to say he probably never got another job again.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[pegdhcp]

In one of my previous incarnations as a system manager, it was like this:

"If you are buying IBM we do not care how much over budget you are..."

BTW, it was a governmental institution... The point was, you would not put IBM on your yard sale list when it is projected/legal life time (5 years) is over. And as far as I know, they are still using IBM PPC 604 based servers I installed in 1995 (14 years and counting...). Of course they are not on the same spot, performing same duties, but they are still useful, as a server class hardware... Given the fact that IBM after sales support in my country sucks (sorry guys), it is a formidable performance...

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true. A good example of this in the hardware industry is EDS. A few years ago, desktop and servers were all from IBM. Then, some big cheese decided that EDS shouldn't be using a comptetitor's hardware, so out went IBM and in came Dell. Now, with the recent takeover, HP management have told EDS to start "dumping" (their words, not mine) perfectly good Dell kit in favour of HP. In many cases the hardware is still under warranty and would not ordinarily be due for replacement. Perception, it seems, is everything.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[xmundt]

Greetings and Salutations...
            Well, as an example of this....QUITE a few years ago, right after college, a good buddy of mine got a job with IBM. The FIRST day on the job he had to copy some documents. Well, he walked to the front of the cube farm and in a loud voice asked "where is the Xerox machine!". It got quiet enough in the cube farm to hear a pin drop...Kind of like that great scene in every Western where the stranger walks into the saloon and even the piano music stops! One of the managers on the floor informed him in no uncertain terms where the THERMOFAX machine was located...
            He really thought at first that his career at IBM was going to last about three hours!
            Regards
            Dave Mundt

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Antity-H]

You never used lotus notes

(disclaimer, I never used it above v8)

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[DrXym]

What do we care? They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.

You should care. It demonstrates that even a massive company like IBM is able to use a largely open source application suite in place of MS Office. If IBM can use it then there really shouldn't be much excuse or impediment for many others. Once MS Office is removed from the picture, what is the reason for using Windows again? The office suite is practically the key stone of the Microsoft-centric office. Remove that and there is very little reason for most workplace desktops to be using Windows at all.

I agree that the underlying file format is a very important change BTW, but it wouldn't be much good if there weren't a suite of software running over the top capable of meeting enterprise requirements.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Dare978Devil]

In the old days, years before OpenOffice or even StarOffice existed, Lotus Symphony was an office suite. So unless this is another "SBC buys AT&T and then starts calling itself AT&T", how can Symphony be described as a variant of OpenOffice in any way, shape, or form?

No man, the Lotus offering was called Lotus SmartSuite. There once was a Lotus offering called Symphony, but that was back in the DOS days. I loved that product, but it never really caught on. It was not an office suite, it was a tool to add charts and things to spreadsheets. And IBM Lotus Symphony (the new one) is a variant of Open Office. It is the base code which has been enhanced to originally be an embedded Office Suite in the Notes 8 client, but has evolved into a fully separate alternative to MS Office. I use it regularly even though I have a full Office license. DD.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[wvmarle]

What do we care? They may use OO.o, their own version branded Symphony, or what-ever.

You should care. It demonstrates that even a massive company like IBM is able to use a largely open source application suite in place of MS Office.

Open source is a nice extra; to the primary thing of a computer is that it works. It has to do the job. Windows is doing the job for many people and I guess there will always be a market for the system.

The key here still is the open file format, which gives users more choice in what software to use. Many users like MS Office - well good for them. But it would be nice for those MS Office users to be able to exchange files with all us non-MS Office users. And for that we need an open format.

The battle should not be "get rid of Windows" or "convert everyone to Linux". That is a religious type battle and we all know what can come from that (just have a look at the mess in the Middle East for example). The battle should be "we are using different software but we want to be able to exchange information with each other". Word processor files are pretty much the final frontier as in another thread here is discussed: most other major formats (music, video, graphics) have a set of standard, open and widely supported formats already.

For example when it comes to music, I can download an mp3 file (the de-facto standard), and play it on virtually any computer, any O/S, and many other devices. Video the same. Graphics also. Somewhat-formatted text as used in web pages also pretty much works out of the box. That one is not fully there yet but we're close. For final formatted text we're there already with pdf and ps formats. Not iso standard afaik but open and well documented, and supported well by many applications for many OSes.

The only problem left is the doc format for file exchanges between word processors. It is well supported nowadays by a.o. OO.o, but it's a hack. Using odf or another fully open and free standard would solve that one too. Even Word supporting odf well and defaulting to it's use would be fine, except we can't trust Microsoft in that.

If only say 20-30% is using not MS Office but another word processor and using .odf to exchange files, that may be enough already to have Word change it's ways. Look at what happened to IE when FF got 15% or so: they suddenly dropped all extras and went highly (for IE that is) standards-compliant and so far continue to move into that direction. And in the end that is what counts. Many people still use IE, many will continue to do so. Good for them. I like FF, others like Chrome, yet others Opera or whatever obscure browser: we can all do so without problems.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[moeinvt]

I love my Lotus stuff. Lotus 1-2-3 is still my favorite spreadsheet of all time, and WordPro is an excellent word processor. It has enough bells and whistles to do everything I want to do without trying to wipe my nose for me (i.e. popping up a stupid paper clip while I'm trying to work). EARLY versions of Lotus Notes had some glitches, but the last few releases have been awesome. I think Notes and Domino get a bad name because of all the capabilities. From a sys-admin point of view, it might be a challenge, but once you're set up, the tools can be really powerful.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Halotron1]

Remember folks, it's the use of open standards that counts. Not the actual implementation - as long as that implementation is correct and follows the standard well, I'm happy. MS Word's lock-in with its doc format is the problem, not MS Word as such.

I would REALLY hope that this move along with the i4i lawsuit could somehow convince some stubborn people at MS to build in full support for ODF docs.

Odds are they'll just throw a crapload of money at their lawyers to appeal for the next 10 years (remember when MS was ordered to split up?)
and get a bunch of MS "partners" to agree to save all their documents in .docx format to push their own standard.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[wvmarle]

and get a bunch of MS "partners" to agree to save all their documents in .docx format to push their own standard.

Which would not be a bad thing in itself, as long as .docx would be a workable, well-published and free standard (free as in free from copyright/patent/trademark/whatever licensing). From what I have read on /. it fails on all three. I don't even care who designed the standard, as long as it is a proper standard. Even having a few open standards for word processing documents wouldn't be a problem - look at how many image formats we have. Let the best standard win - only to be taken over by an even better standard. It's competition we need really, and open and free standards are an important part in that.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

It demonstrates that even a massive company like IBM is able to use a largely open source application suite in place of MS Office.

As someone who works for IBM, let me state that what it proves is that IBM management no longer wants to pay the license fee for MS Office. That doesn't necessarily mean that those of us in the trenches are finding it to be an adequate replacement. Speaking as someone who frequently has to exchange documents with customers and vendors, believe me, it isn't.

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then people who have some special needs can take their special-needs-word processor and have no problems with compatibility."

Wouldn't those people most likely have an add on thats Word compatible? I would be surprised if there was no add on for MS Word that worked for the blind for instance...

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[vgerdj]

Lotus then created SmartSuite. My favorite office suite off all times, ...

hear hear

Re:OpenOffice variant?

[DrXym]

Of course money has to do with it. If it didn't then everyone would stick with MS Office. After all, it's a decent enough suite, even if it's locked into MS Windows and other Microsoft products. I would not be surprised if IBM has realised its spending hundreds of millions on software licences, money that it doesn't need to and that is incentive enough to transition away.

As for other customers, I'm sure IBM's rationale is that if you need to exchange documents then either a) save/load them in .doc format, b) print them in PDF, c) make customers use ODF possibly through contractual agreement, d) allow employees to get special dispensation to install MS Word on a case by case basis.

About fucking time!

[lukas84]

Previously, the used MS Office but actually recommended their customers to use Symphony. That's just a laughable position.

I'm glad the finally changed this, but i'm not sure if this actually means anything. IBM's slow as molasses in regards to everything. Want a server from them? Better wait 4-6 weeks.

Re:About fucking time!

[DavidR1991]

If a 10-day change is "slow as molasses" then I'd like to see what happens when they react quickly to something!

Re:About fucking time!

[lukas84]

The switch to Symphony has been a standing order for a long time. It's just that nobody cared. Now they've set a very short ultimatum, which is something positive. But i've always seen them as an extremely slow company.

Re:About fucking time!

[jimicus]

I tend to agree with the GP. IBM are an absolutely typical conservative company. IMO, if they're dictating everything change within 10 days this has probably been brewing internally for the better part of a year or more.

Re:About fucking time!

[magsol]

After interning with IBM this past summer, I can say without equivocation that 95% of IBM's employees use Symphony. Lotus Notes in particular in a central cog in what is otherwise a pretty complete office productivity package.
For IBM to mandate the use of this package is, truthfully, making official what has already been regular practice for quite some time.

Re:About fucking time!

[lukas84]

Well, all the IBM sales reps i've dealt with had to purchase Office 2007 through their expense account, because IBM wouldn't buy a volume license.

None of them used Symphony. All the stuff up on PartnerWorld is in .ppt too, created by PowerPoint.

Re:About fucking time!

[oenone.ablaze]

As another intern at IBM this summer I can say without equivocation that I don't think you understand just how big IBM is. I was in Research, and I certainly didn't know anyone who used Symphony with any regularity. There's Global Business Services (IBM's massive consulting arm), too, and I know for certain that people working there use whatever their clients want them to use, which is often MS Office.

Re:About fucking time!

[Compholio]

There's Global Business Services (IBM's massive consulting arm), too, and I know for certain that people working there use whatever their clients want them to use, which is often MS Office.

And now their clients will use whatever IBM tells them to use (that being Lotus Symphony). *queue evil laugh*

Re:About fucking time!

[magsol]

I interacted with offices all over the globe (North Carolina, California, Canada, China, Germany, Armonk) - even traveled a bit - and everyone I spoke and worked with was all about Symphony; it was ODP or bust.

But you raise an interesting point: Research was the single IBM division with which I was unable to involve myself (and to this day continue to try and get my foot into, so if you have any contacts I'm honestly interested :) ), so I can readily accept that Research has not jumped on the Symphony bandwagon yet.

Re:About fucking time!

[diamondsw]

As a ten-year employee, I can say without equivocation that you don't have a fricken clue how large IBM is. Your department may have used Symphony. My department is still stuck with custom programs written in 1-2-3, and does at least 95% of its work in Word and Excel (including more custom programming). I have never seen a single ODF file cross my desk, on any project, for any customer.

IBM mandates lots of stuff internally that doesn't necessarily matter. And if you wait a a few weeks, they'll reorg and change their mind.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here...I have never seen an ODF file in my inbox, full stop. Now, lots of people in my area use Symphony, simply because they no longer have office licenses, but the MS Office file formats still rule the world. (Except for the ancient Lotus SmartSuite files. Yuck!)

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Interns do not have access to such details.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

*queue evil laugh*

you're looking for the word "cue" (as in a signal to perform some action) rather than "queue" (as in forming an ordered line)

Re:About fucking time!

[magsol]

Fair enough, you are absolutely correct; I overspoke in my previous comment. No, an internship certainly isn't a good barometer for the overall size of the company. Still, my entire department and all the VPs I interacted with - and their departments as well (all over the world; see my response to oenone.ablaze above) - were all buried in Symphony (whether or not they actually liked it over MS Office, however, was a different matter entirely). Over the summer, we literally worked exclusively with ODTs and ODPs.

Re:About fucking time!

[Bodrius]

"queue" in joke about OO responsiveness, Java dependencies, and the validity of the original statement.

I kid, I kid...

I haven't really been actively using OO for quite a few years, I don't know if that criticism is still as frequent - or valid - as it was back in ye olde days.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um working at IBM for 5 years and counting (Division 5) no uses Lotus crap period.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

10 day change? As someone who works at IBM, that's fast.

Internally, IBM is utterly disfunctional. Nothing gets done, nothing ever changes. There hasn't even been an announcement telling us to switch to Symphony.

Re:About fucking time!

[jimbojones71]

I'm an IBM-er, based in the antipodes. Sometime in the last year, it became compulsory to have Lotus Symphony pushed to our PCs (in the APAC region, at least) - I can't recall the exact date. But as yet we have not been told to stop using MS Office, and the new PC my PM was issued with last week came with it installed by default so it seems to still be part of the corporate SOE. I know that the guys in IBM Software Group (SWG) have been pushed pretty hard to use Symphony. I assume at some point the rest of us will be too. I have to say, I am not very excited about an IBM office suite. I would rather that IBM just supported Open Office.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seeing a lot of confused posts here, including this parent.

Firstly, using Symphony does not require using ODF documents.

Secondly, the parent does not appear to have noticed some things that would be more obvious to an intern who had to install a fresh copy of office productivity software. If you, as a wise old IBM veteran of 10 years, think people can install and use whatever they've always used for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets, I recommend that you take a look at what's available for installation on your system.

Re:About fucking time!

[H0p313ss]

so I can readily accept that Research has not jumped on the Symphony bandwagon yet.

Its not that we haven't jumped on it.... it's that we tried it out and opened up the engine... and found that this bandwagon has no legs.

Re:About fucking time!

[BrokenHalo]

I don't know if that criticism is still as frequent - or valid - as it was back in ye olde days.

I'm pleased to say it's not. Back in the days when it was StarOffice, and a few years subsequent to that, there were some disgraceful latencies, especially in the glacial start-up time.

That seems to have been pretty much fixed, and responsiveness is at least as good as any MSOffice installation I have seen. I don't have formal benchmarks here, but for instance on this oldish 2.16 GHz Macbook I have a copy of Office 2004 (rarely used but patched up to date) and the current version of NeoOffice. NeoOffice starts up in 1/2 the 18-second time MS Word does. Once running, there is no perceptible lag, so I'm happy enough.

Re:About fucking time!

[JAlexoi]

Last time I checked Lotus Symphony was bundled with Lotus Notes 8 suite.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

As an employee of just a few months, I find it incredibly frustrating that we are continually being told to use Symphony and then people (often the same people who are telling us this) keep sending round doc, docx, ppt, etc files (Ironically, I was asked recently for a suggestion about reading a docx file that wouldn't open in Word. My suggestion was to use OpenOffice, and this worked). I, for one, hope that this is one edict that will actually be taken seriously, but I bow to the experience of someone who has been with the company for ten years.

Re:About fucking time!

[Lostlander]

Wagons aren't supposed to have legs they have wheels e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon

Also what does a wagon that takes a band to a gig have to do with software?

Re:About fucking time!

[magsol]

No legs is right. Even though everyone I worked with in some capacity or another used Symphony, it was a major headache to use.

Re:About fucking time!

[Random BedHead Ed]

Previously, [IBM] used MS Office but actually recommended their customers to use Symphony.

This reminds me of what happened to OS/2. IBM messed that up royally, and it had long term consequences. The screw-up had a lot to do with the fact that they didn't present a united front for their own product (not entirely surprising, since they were also a Windows-selling OEM ... not to mention a massive, labyrinthine company). It's nice to see them dog-fooding their office suite as thoroughly as possible - perhaps they've learned a thing or two in the past decade and a half.

Re:About fucking time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude... what!? After working at IBM for 7 years and continuing to do so I can say you really need to lay off the crack. Some managers have been forced to use Symphony but every one of them that does hates it and secretly uses Office whenever possible. Symphony is a heaping pile and I've seen no such mandate that I'm supposed to use Symphony or any ODF and I'll ignore it if I do (though I frankly don't expect to) I like OO way better than Symphony which is ironic because it's based on OO. The ONLY reason I've installed Symphony is because I develop software that works with Office apps and looked at doing the same w/ Crapfony.

first post?

[Anonymous Coward]

and its always good to see people switching to openoffice :)

Wait. What?

[Anonymous Coward]

". . . past their acquisition of Sun . . ."

I think someone's been misreading recent headlines.

Ooo's

[ironicsky]

All these Oo.o's remind me of family guy

Peter: Oh my God, Brian, there's a message in my alphabets... it says Ooooo!
Brian: Peter those are Cheerios.
Sound Clip

Re:Ooo's

[Compuser]

Yeah, at first I thought Oo.o is the sound a giraffe makes when it cums. //Not a troll. //Yes, this is a ripoff of an old Russian joke about the letter Ñ.

Re:Ooo's

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. Is that character supposed to look like a giraffe having an orgasm?

Re:Ooo's

[Anonymous Coward]

OH MY GOD YOU'RE FUCKING HILARIOUS!

And you're, like, SOOOO clever, too! NO-ONE I know has ever learned Russian, not even the Ukranians and Tajikistanis!

Fuck off and get a life to actually be proud of, you effete little prick.

Re:Ooo's

[Molochi]

Everytime I see OO.o I think of this (Sir Bedimir's line)....

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mphg/mphg.htm#Scene%2034

Re:Ooo's

[Compuser]

No, that's translit being garbled. The letter which I can try to write using English characters as "bI". The joke goes that noone starts a word with it but a giraffe "ends" with it (the Russian slang for orgasm being "to end").

In my dreams

[phantomfive]

In my dreams, Microsoft Word got replaced by a word processor that naturally creates beautiful documents, that lays them out consistently every time you open them (and between versions), and has a simple easy to use interface.

Open Office is not that program.

However, the beauty of open file formats is that now someone else can write that program, and there will be no barrier to entry, we can start using it right away. In fact, if I am the only person in the world who thinks emacs bindings in a word processor is a good idea, I can use them, and still interoperate with the rest of the world.

Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.

Re:In my dreams

[jmorris42]

> Because we all have different ideas of what the perfect word processor will be, this is one step closer to a happy software world.

Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable. Meanwhile Word docs aren't even certain to be compatible between two different installs of the same version of Word. Buy a new printer and connect it to the same install and previous docs will often need to be reformatted. Good riddence to that!

Oh, and IBM didn't buy Sun; Oracle bought the corpse to loot it.

Re:In my dreams

[CarpetShark]

In my dreams, Microsoft Word got replaced by a word processor that naturally creates beautiful documents, that lays them out consistently every time you open them (and between versions), and has a simple easy to use interface.

Open Office is not that program.

Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.

But what OO.o does do is provide a more liberated document format for businesses and other organisations around the world to interchange documents with, and to implement document management and other business processes around. That's a big enough thing in its own right, albeit nothing but an internationalised return to the status that we had years ago with ASCII.

Re:In my dreams

[digitalunity]

Still images, check. GIF, JPG, TIF.
Audio, check. AIFF, WAV, MP2, MP3.
Vector graphics, mmm not much. EPS, CGM. SVG too new really to count.
Video, no way. Couple really popular ones(MPEG1, MPEG2, H261/263, FLV). A gazillion not so popular or interoperable ones such as RealVideo, Sorensen Video, Indeo, Cinepak, TrueMotion, Theora, MPEG4.

I get your point though, the computing world has settled on a small set of file formats, excluding office productivity. MS should have taken a more logical, engineering approach to file formats instead of letting new UI features dictate file format.

Re:In my dreams

[Kjella]

Exactly. Most other data types standardized on one or a handful of formats long ago, it was the Microsoft monopoly that distorted things with formatted text and spreadsheets. Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video! All interoperable.z/quote>

I think you're comparing apples to oranges here, with sound or still images or video I don't really care how it's stored as such only that it decodes to uncompressed audio/video frames. It is the decoded version, the simplest of structures, that is the universal intermediary. With documents the whole point is in preserving and manipulating the markup, what it renders to as a screenshot is completely irrelevant. That means to convert from say MS Office to OpenOffice you have to map the content, layout, every setting, every function, every formula, everything. You need to have exact specifications on both formats and things must mean the same, That is completely and utterly the opposite of the examples you make.

P.S. You're horribly, horribly wrong about vector graphics.

Re:In my dreams

[gtbritishskull]

Also, I can open any of those document formats on my linux computer using open source programs and "display" it correctly. If I get a word document (or excel or ppt) then I am lucky if it has all the functionality (not to mention actually formatted the same).

Re:In my dreams

[Hurricane78]

Problem is: LyX (the good LaTeX editor) lacks any layouting capabilities. You can't visually design the basic classes (document, paragraph, text, etc). That is a no-go for me, because I don't want to learn yet another layouting language, no matter how good it is. (I don't want to learn any of those, but unfortunately I already know one.)

What I really really wonder is, why everybody creates this false dichotomy of "text/console = keyboard controlled" and "graphics/GUI = mouse controlled".
I meant just give me a visual layout designer that you type into like you would write code or in VI, but that renders everything graphically.

Example input: "NbLsfancy\ncvchw50%h25%IHello\nS" (where \n = <Enter>)
Resulting instructions executed: New { box (and put cursor on it) }, layout mode { inherit style from class "fancy", center vertically, center horizontally, width 50%, height 25% }, input mode { insert "Hello" }, save file
It's not hard to code something like this. It's extremely fast, to work with it. And with a list of possible commands in a given state always visible, the key highlighted, auto-completion, context-help and update of that on every key press (basically like in a good code editor), it's also very intuitive.

Re:In my dreams

[melikamp]

[...] far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats [...] sound, still images, vector graphics, even video [...]

Text is far more complicated than any of these, with vector graphics being the most complicated left, IMHO. Sound, raster graphics, and video are just arrays with a fixed data type. There are other data fields, of course, but they are vastly less important. A rich text document, on the other hand, may have to deal with concepts like page layout, paragraph options, text options, text positioning, hierarchical styling, embedded objects, and everyone's favorite embedded scripts. That's why all off their files look like two or more markup languages are colliding in a spectacular explosion. That is if you are lucky and they are not, on top of all that, compressed binaries.

Re:In my dreams

[Thinboy00]

[...] far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats [...] sound, still images, vector graphics, even video [...]

Text is far more complicated than any of these, with vector graphics being the most complicated left, IMHO. Sound, raster graphics, and video are
just arrays with a fixed data type. There are other data fields, of course, but they are vastly less important. A rich text document, on the other hand,
may have to deal with concepts like page layout, paragraph options, text options, text positioning, hierarchical styling, embedded objects, and everyone's favorite embedded scripts. That's why all off their files look like two or more markup languages are colliding in a spectacular explosion. That is if you are lucky and they are not, on top of all that, compressed binaries.

Embedded scripts should be nixed for the security concerns alone. If you need to send someone a script, send them a script, not an MS Word document.

Re:In my dreams

[Thinboy00]

Problem is: LyX (the good LaTeX editor) lacks any layouting capabilities. You can't visually design the basic classes (document, paragraph, text, etc). That is a no-go for me, because I don't want to learn yet another layouting language, no matter how good it is. (I don't want to learn any of those, but unfortunately I already know one.)

What I really really wonder is, why everybody creates this false dichotomy of "text/console = keyboard controlled" and "graphics/GUI = mouse controlled".
I meant just give me a visual layout designer that you type into like you would write code or in VI, but that renders everything graphically.

Example input: "NbLsfancy\ncvchw50%h25%IHello\nS" (where \n = <Enter>)
Resulting instructions executed: New { box (and put cursor on it) }, layout mode { inherit style from class "fancy", center vertically, center horizontally, width 50%, height 25% }, input mode { insert "Hello" }, save file
It's not hard to code something like this. It's extremely fast, to work with it. And with a list of possible commands in a given state always visible, the key highlighted, auto-completion, context-help and update of that on every key press (basically like in a good code editor), it's also very intuitive.

Unfortunately, there are too many weird people who like Emacs.

Re:In my dreams

[i_ate_god]

Just as an interesting thought: you could consider the complex rhythms of keyboard shortcuts to be a programming language on its own.

You could be amazed at how much you can do before reaching for the mouse, just through the keyboard shortcuts of most major GUI applications. Windows Vista made this even easier with their little "Search for application" in the start menu:

Super -> "Editplus" -> Tab -> Enter -> Alt-D -> "P" -> "P" -> Enter -> Start coding in PHP with proper syntax highlighting -> Ctrl-S -> "filename.php" -> Enter

In Windows, I have created a php script file using my personal favorite windows editor without once reaching for my mouse.

But yes, this isn't creating a layout, but you can effectively create a box and manipulate it in 3D Studio Max without reaching for the mouse. In the Hammer map editor for the Source game engine, manipulation of objects is not necessarily 100% mouse free, but you can greatly limit the use of the mouse with keyboard shortcuts.

Numerous examples exist of applications that are as keyboard centric as they are mouse centric across all operating systems.

Re:In my dreams

[im_thatoneguy]

Are you kidding? Still images are ridiculously easy to standardize the encoding of. And even then once you get slightly more complicated such as PSD the standard and the implementation becomes more and more difficult.

On the video front you have 'standards' such as OMF or AAF that rarely actually work perfectly.

In 3D we have Collada and FBX. Neither of which adequately describe a full 3D scene completely yet.

A text document is a very complicated file with the potential for an enormous amount of bizzare formatting and embedded data. None of the XML based standards are simple or small. They're just varying levels of complex. I would say a document standard is representing far more complex data than video but less complex than 3D scenes.

Re:In my dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

And that LaTeX editor very nearly exists. LyX. (I say nearly, because LyX isn't actually a LaTeX editor. It's a LyX editor, but the files happen to be perfectly map-able onto LaTeX.)

Also, I kind of hate Leslie and Don a little for giving us that awful capitalization scheme when talking about their projects.

Re:In my dreams

[calmofthestorm]

As a longtime faithful LyX user, in addition to agreeing with you completely, I should also mention that stability, consistent output, and less confusingness are needed. They could go one of two routes: either integrate better with LaTeX so that I can do my layout with it, or use it only as a backend and make layout work better. They do neither of these.

Personally I'd like to see a click-editable one-pane LaTeX editor with dual mode view for source view (even if the live rendering isn't perfect, eg LyX, it's good enough).

LyX also has terrible version compatibility; often a document saved in one version will not render in later versions.

It has a great start, but LyX needs tons of polish before it's anywhere close to achieving its full potential.

Re:In my dreams

[mdwh2]

What about PDF?

Think about it, far more complex data is encoded in standardized formats that a multitude of programs all process and exchange data through. Look at sound, still images, vector graphics, even video!

The problem here is not complexity, but variation. Sound, images and even video are all straightforward - you just have a waveform (for sound), or pixels and a number of frames. There simply isn't much variation - so the file formats can change how the data is represented, but what's represented is pretty obvious.

Now what do we represent formatted text as? How do we factor things such as tables, paragraphs, fonts etc? Do we want things fixed perfectly (like PDF) or the formatting to depend on the user settings (like HTML)? There's no end of possibilities. Even worse with a spreadsheet format.

A better analogy would not be sound, but file formats used for music composition software. Yeah, there's General MIDI, but that's very limited, because it fits to the lowest common denominator. Or an image file format that also sorts information about the creation of the image - different layers, undo history, etc. Is there a standard for that? Consider, why do products like PaintShop Pro and the GIMP have their own file formats (incompatible with each other)? Why doesn't GIMP just use PNG, instead of its own custom file format?

The flaw in your argument is that you're comparing the file format that the author wants, with the end document. If all you want is the end document, then why not print to PDF? See, there's your common format. Ah, but you say, that's no use to you if you want to go back an edit the document? Well precisely - just as your cited audio, image and video formats are no use to the creator of those documents.

Another example would be 3D file formats - no such standard there.

Re:In my dreams

[wisty]

HTML would be a good office productivity format. Just add some layout tags for paper format ...

Re:In my dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

In my dreams, Microsoft Word got replaced by a word processor that naturally creates beautiful documents, that lays them out consistently every time you open them (and between versions), and has a simple easy to use interface.

Really? My dreams have naked cheerleaders. I think you need to retrain your subconscious.

Re:In my dreams

[Schlemphfer]

>>and has a simple easy to use interface.

>Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.

I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.

Re:In my dreams

[Greyfox]

TeX is that program. People don't like it because markup is "hard". Well that and they try to control exactly what the document should look like, which is something you're mostly supposed to let TeX manage for you.

Re:In my dreams

[MightyYar]

[cough] LaTeX [cough]

Re:In my dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is simple to use. The only difficulties related to using LaTeX are dealing with add ons, or customizing its behavior. If you're happy with the standard classes or your house classes, you're set.

Re:In my dreams

[DMUTPeregrine]

LyX goes a very long way towards making it easy to use. Especially with BibDesk for bibliography management. Not perfect, but good enough for many people I've shown it to.

Re:In my dreams

[syousef]

Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.

LaTeX does not even resemble a WYSIWYG word processor. The grand parent just asked for a coping saw and you handed him a jack hammer.

Re:In my dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

In my dreams, who do you think all the naked cheerleaders just happen to come to when they need help with this strange, unfamiliar and oh-so-arousing new word processor?

Re:In my dreams

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The point of TeX and LaTeX, is that you are not suppose to visually design anything. You just write content. The Style does the visual design.

A word processor is not suppose to be a desktop publishing tool. The written word is suppose to be easy to read. Not look nice in a frame. The number of times people give me CV/report that look nice from a distance but are bloody awful to read. I can't track lines across a page that 200 chars wide!

And the other problem is what size paper are you printing on? Now change it from Letter(US) to A4(rest of the world) and now you have to change the visual layout.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying we all should use latex. But i think people need to look at what problem they are in fact trying to solve. Write a letter, or design a pamphlet? The current crop of word processes turns every task into the later.

Re:In my dreams

[pato101]

I agree LyX has problems with version compatibility. Some small changes are sometimes required to "upgrade" your old .lyx document.

Personally I'd like to see a click-editable one-pane LaTeX editor with dual mode view for source view (even if the live rendering isn't perfect, eg LyX, it's good enough).

Perhaps, Texmacs would do for you? Note also, that current versions of LyX show you the LaTeX code live.

It has a great start, but LyX needs tons of polish before it's anywhere close to achieving its full potential.

While I agree, I just want to point that LyX has improved very much during the last years.

Re:In my dreams

[pato101]

Also, I kind of hate Leslie and Don a little for giving us that awful capitalization scheme when talking about their projects.

Not sure what you are talking about, but perhaps it is solved with these lines at your preamble:
\lhead{\nouppercase{\rightmark}}
\rhead{\nouppercase{\leftmark}}
or, if you use fancy headings
\fancyhead[el,or]{\fancyplain{}{\sl\nouppercase{\rightmark}}}
\fancyhead[er,ol]{\fancyplain{}{\sl\nouppercase{\leftmark}}}

Re:In my dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It's TeX and LaTeX. :-)

(Well, naturally beautiful, check. Consistent, absoutely, check. Simple easy to use interface? well, if you're a programmer...)

Re:In my dreams

[calmofthestorm]

Hehe yes, they've made great progress, and generally been responsive to my bug reports. I've been using it since I was a freshman in college, to type all my problemsets and exams, and to take notes in class. Even back then (2005), it was significantly faster than writing math down by hand.

I should look at texmacs or upgrade lyx. Perhaps both.

Re:In my dreams

[CrashNBrn]

So what yer saying is that MS Office formats should have codecs ?

Re:In my dreams

[bazorg]

Open Office is not that program.

Maybe Excel then?

Re:In my dreams

[AliasMarlowe]

I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.

There's a difference between producing output and producing good output. Doing the latter is rarely simple or easy, but is often easier with LaTeX than with Word or OpenOffice, especially if the document in question is long and requires consistent structure.

Re:In my dreams

[patrickthbold]

LaTeX is certainly hard to learn, but it's quite easy to use. And yes I do think it's an important difference.

Re:In my dreams

[Harnish]

>>and has a simple easy to use interface.
>Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.
I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.

True, but anyone who has used LaTeX for more than a few hours has long since left sanity behind. I'd have to say CarpetShark kind of has a point ;)

Symphony vs OO

[ArkiMage]

According to this article Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/IBM-Throws-Out-Microsoft-Office

Re:Symphony vs OO

[NevarMore]

According to the summary Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.

... Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) ...

Re:Symphony vs OO

[zlogic]

It actually uses Eclipse for the GUI and OpenOffice for opening/saving/formatting/displaying documents

Re:Symphony vs OO

[i.of.the.storm]

Hmm, I'm an eclipse user but I shudder to think of the slowness that marrying eclipse and OO.o would bring about.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[TheRaven64]

Was this the result of a focus group reporting that OO.o was too fast?

Re:Symphony vs OO

[zlogic]

It uses 200+ megs of RAM just after starting. Take that, Firefox!

Re:Symphony vs OO

[zlogic]

Perhaps IBM want their regular employees to kick Team Eclipse's ass until they make it fast.
Or make people quit out of frustration instead of laying them off.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[digitalunity]

The speed of Symphony shouldn't be your most serious concern - it's fairly snappy on a fast desktop, aside from the loading time.

It should be noted that Symphony is a HEAVILY modified version of OO.o. Symphony has a very clean UI and is extraordinarily easy to use. However, it does not offer all of the same features of OO.o.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[i.of.the.storm]

Yeah, actually for me Firefox seems to plateau around 200MB, so I don't have many problems with Firefox on my desktop (6 GB total RAM). Strangely, on my laptop with 3GB RAM and a CPU in the same family, Firefox is ridiculously slow, and I have no idea why. Actually, the same goes for eclipse on my desktop and laptop. Meh.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[i.of.the.storm]

Eh, I was joking mostly. I really don't know why I got modded insightful, if I were metamodding I would disagree with that. In any case, I actually use MS Office (blasphemy, I know) because I can get it cheap and I actually like 2007.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[hedwards]

And as long as you use Sun's ODF plug in, it shouldn't matter to anybody at all. Using MS Office isn't necessarily bad, but using their file formats causes a lot of head aches. And for some things like email, the format is just not safe. Ideally everybody would be using some sort of open or well supported format so that it wouldn't make any difference.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[icebraining]

On the other hand, Firefox is fine in my 512MB Desktop. Figure that out

Re:Symphony vs OO

[i.of.the.storm]

Yeah, I really don't know what's wrong with Firefox on my laptop. It might have something to do with frequency scaling, or I might have something wrong with my profile.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Thinboy00]

Eh, I was joking mostly. I really don't know why I got modded insightful, if I were metamodding I would disagree with that. In any case, I actually use MS Office (blasphemy, I know) because I can get it cheap and I actually like 2007.

How do you save OpenDocument stuff? The built in support is technically compliant but fails miserably at interoperating with any other implementation.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Greyfox]

You don't know who you're dealing with here. These people have been forced to use Lotus Notes for E-Mail for years. The ones that are left are largely immune to frustration.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[i.of.the.storm]

Well, I rarely use Office programs at all really, and when I do it's usually a small assignment that I'll just print out and turn in. If I need to share something with others, I'll either use Google Docs or export to PDF. If I actually ever needed to interoperate with others, I might care but most of the time I don't. I'm planning on learning LaTeX for anything more serious though.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Anonymous Coward]

How does 2Gb of RAM cost you versus MSFT Office license?
Seriously, why do we have cheap 64 bit machines if we still worry about 200Mb?

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Gazzonyx]

... and probably well armed...

Re:Symphony vs OO

[kokoko1]

On my lappy with 1GB ram FF is working fine.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[TheTurtlesMoves]

How did you get it that low? :) OO uses 250+ on my machine (I almost never use it) and eclipse (use it all the time) uses 400M after startup and goes up pretty quickly from there. The biggest problem with FF is /.. It goes really slow on this site.

Re:Symphony vs OO

[cbraescu1]

But Firefox fights back by leaking memory every second till it's shut off. Take that, Eclipse + OO!

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Symphony. I found it nicer than OO.o for reviewing and editing documents. I also liked the tabbed interface, which allowed me to have several documents for a project open at once and to open them as a group.

It is as bad as OO.o at exchanging files with pictures and captions with MS word though.

Also, due to the tabbed interface, when it crashes, you lose ALL the tabs, which is a pain.

And why oh why did they include a browser in it?

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Just Some Guy]

It uses 200+ megs of RAM just after starting. Take that, Firefox!

Dang! That's over 3% of the RAM in my desktop! Verily, we must cast down the infidels!

Re:Symphony vs OO

[Anonymous Coward]

As a current IBM GBS employee, Notes has been slowly driving me mad! I can't wait until I don't have to use that bloatware anymore!

As to the OP, this is the first that I've heard of this company mandate and I highly doubt that they would be removing Office from any PC's after the licenses have already been paid for.

Microsoft Bob reborn?

[ClosedSource]

I guess they felt they should get something from the acquisition of Lotus Symphony so that's what they call their version of OpenOffice. Perhaps Microsoft should offer their own version of OO and call it "Microsoft Bob".

Re:Microsoft Bob reborn?

[syousef]

I guess they felt they should get something from the acquisition of Lotus Symphony so that's what they call their version of OpenOffice. Perhaps Microsoft should offer their own version of OO and call it "Microsoft Bob".

Don't you mean "Microsoft BOO.ob"

Re:Microsoft Bob reborn?

[TheLink]

I doubt tiny and soft would be a good selling point for that.

Re:Microsoft Bob reborn?

[Funk_dat69]

MS bo.b?

1/3 of a million employees

[smooth123]

Way to go IBM. But I am guessing that the support staff is going to have a huge job on their hands. Nice to see a big company take the plunge of moving out of M$ Office. I like the statement in TFA that they are just practicing what they preach and not doing the switch to save on license fees ROFL.... I like the idea but there is no need make saints out of IBM. B U T is in the I of the Bee Holder

Re:1/3 of a million employees

[CarpetShark]

But I am guessing that the support staff is going to have a huge job on their hands.

Which may not be a bad thing if IBM has to patch things and send those patches upstream.

Re:1/3 of a million employees

[lorenlal]

Very true. Forcing a company to eat their own food could certainly benefit all of us who use it.

Re:1/3 of a million employees

[palegray.net]

I believe you meant "to eat one's own dog food."

WordPro?

[slim]

Not long ago, IBM's standard word processor was Lotus WordPro.

I have a load of .LWP files lying around from my IBM days, that I can't read...

It goes to show that a company like IBM can function using a "minority" office suite.

Re:WordPro?

[Anonymous Coward]

How to read Lotus Word Pro:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WordProConverter.htm

Re:WordPro?

[josgeluk]

OO.o will happily read your .lwp files.

Re:WordPro?

[datajack]

... as will Symphony.

Symphony (as you would expect) was able to read LWP files a lot earlier than OO.o was able to (I have only just noticed that Version 3.0 can do so). I basically used to use Symphony as a LWP > ODF converter.

Re:WordPro?

[couchslug]

"Not long ago, IBM's standard word processor was Lotus WordPro."

Still available as part of SmartSuite:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/smartsuite/wordprofeatures.html

Re:WordPro?

[uarch]

It goes to show that a company like IBM can function using a "minority" office suite.

That depends on how you define "function."

Re:WordPro?

[Orion Blastar]

Well Yahoo Answers has a link to A Lotus Smartsuite FTP Site click on KVLOTUS.EXE and it will be a Lotus Smartsuite viewer. You can then load .LWP files and then copy and paste them to any sort of office suite or word processing program and then save as that format.

That is if you decide not to use Lotus Symphony. In this listed features

Interoperability with SmartSuite documents

        * Added supports to load SmartSuite customer files.
        * Improved support for graphic and layout.

IBM would have to be pretty stupid to abandon Lotus Smartsuite and not make Lotus Symphony work with the old legacy data files.

It is free to download you can download it right here and then start to work on your old Lotus Wordpro files and convert them to ODF format one by one.

Re:WordPro?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was pleased to learn that the new IBM OO.o "Symphony" can read/convert lotus word pro (.lwp) files.

Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing. Software isn't better just because it's free -- especially in business, where value is in the return on investment, not the initial cost. The point of open software is to use the code, not the program. Very few users dive into OOo code, nor care to even consider doing so.

This will be yet another short-term effect, whereby large groups of people try to use something that isn't microsoft, only to discover that decades of effort and billions of dollars later, microsoft has developed a program better than most -- and certainly better than OOo, but about five years. It's a small better, but it's a better better.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[HermMunster]

And software isn't worse just because it's free.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[TheRaven64]

Are you as stupid as your post appears? IBM are switching to Lotus Symphony which, although it shares a lot of code with OO.o, is an IBM product, developed by IBM staff. This is not 'getting something for free' this is 'using your own products'.

Honestly, Microsoft needs to pay its shills more. The current crop really aren't trying.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since with FOSS, the investment is zero, then any return makes infinity percent return so that's a pretty sweet deal for any business, right. Right?
 

See, we can both make ridiculous claims about FOSS, but I suspect the truth is somewhere between the two viewpoints.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Anonymous Coward]

A paid for Word Processor would have suggested Feeble

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Rockoon]

But it is worse when its worse, in spite of it being free.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Nefarious Wheel]

This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing.

Give me a break. It's more important to have the capability of reading and writing documents everywhere and not having to worry about information surviving past the arbitrary economic lifespan of some corporation.

By focusing on the ROI on document software, something that should be as prevalent and available as air, you're letting a fixation on the rocks in the road cost you your awareness of the horizon. Look up for once and stop muttering at your shoes.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[lorenlal]

Value seems to be a theme for you. I figured I'd check your recent posts to see if you really do behave like a MS sponsored poster... Which as far as I can tell, you aren't. Kudos.

I think you are ignoring something quite basic here. IBM is the maintainer for Symphony. I think they *should* use their own product. They get value out of it by extending the testing cycle to all the phases of the SDP. They also get value in not having to pay off a competitor to use a product that they already have. Furthermore, I expect there to be a great return on this investment simply because of all the complaining I hear every day about Microsoft Office. If IBM can truly make a better wheel, use it, refine it and hopefully distribute it, then I'm all for it.

It's not a matter of not paying for it, it's also not a matter of monopoly busting... It's about making a better product. I think most of the office software out there is terrible. I'm also pretty sure that as long as nobody tries to make a better product, we won't see it magically appear from the dominant player. Someday I hope upgrading to a new version of a suite won't completely break what's working in an old edition (See Office 2003->Office 2007... They are similar in name only). I hope that there ends up being a way of defining a document such that you can just freaking open it later regardless of what software you decide to migrate to.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

Nope, it's worse when it has fewer features, fewer developments, and fewer compatibilities. It's worse when it doesn't have in-roads into the given user's industry practices too.

All I'm saying is that OOo is late-to-the-game, and simply isn't quite as advanced yet. They've got a long way to go, and others have had a substantive head-start.

Now why would I support a lesser product? Why would I support a late-comer? Why would I risk my hard-earned business on a product that simply isn't as mature yet?

There's one reason -- it saves me money. That becomes a value proposition. Value propositions are straight-forward business decisions. Those are easy.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

"Of course, they are doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full-fledged alternative to Microsoft."

There's more to the post than simply the facts. And certainly other comments are available to me as inspiration.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

.R.O.I. is only a percentage-of-investment calculation when you can vary the absolute value of that investment, thereby effecting a greater return via a greater investment.

In this case, you can't really invest more, and you can't really save more. So the only thing that matters is the absolute amounts -- as perhaps it always did.

So what's the greatest amount able to be saved? You get to calculate it for your own needs. And what's the greatest productivity improvement available?

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

Aside from maybe ascii text files, and possibly RTF, you're going to be hard-pressed to find any format which will survive for twenty years. That said, I give you my personal and professional guarantee that in fifty yeras from now, you'll be able to find a Word .doc converter to just about anything. PDF too. Simply because they are popular enough.

It's got nothing to do with open versus proprietary. The "open" part of open is the source code, not the availability. It's not that complicated.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

(Incidentally, thanks for checking up on me. that's awesome. few people do that.)

I too agree that every company should use their own product. Not only for testing purposes, but also because they have enough power over the product to benefit from internal changes quickly and effectively -- moreso than their users.

But in this case, I focus most on the "alternative to ms office" part of teh post, as well as many comments. IBM didn't make the software, IBM only adapted it. Your point about someone making a better wheel is a great one. But in this case, I view it more like IBM's making designer spokes, and putting the playing card in them, rather tahn actually building the wheel.

You can already open a document anywhere. Ascii text files, even RTF, well-formatted HTML, and sometimes PDF. Everything else suffers from the wonderful world of layout efforts.

And it's simple to see why. Imagine, if in March, North American businesses switched to a slightly different size of paper -- let's say for environmental reasons, whatever. Let's say the new paper size is 9.5" x 10". Someone studied that more of today's content can fit better that way.

Now every single format that isn't based on free-flowing content is totally useless. And every existing document you have, independent of program or format, is just useless, because it simply won't look right.

There are advancements to be made, and they aren't in interface, file format, and general features. Everyone trying to build the "better wheel" as you call it, keeps trying to build the better wheel for yesterday's roads, forgetting that the existing solution leaves the problem solved-enough.

I'm reminded of the old concept of square wheels on cars. Wheels aren't round because square wheels don't roll. Wheels are round because square wheels don't roll on flat pavement.

But there is a rolling-hill, moggle-style road surface on which square wheels rool smoothly, and round wheels do not. This road surface would actually allow cars to break in a much shorter distance -- because locked-wheels simply couldn't slide.

Of course, creating those roads would be incredibly costly, and certainly not worth-while.

Re-inventing the wheel is worthless when all you do is consider the problems that are being solved by the current wheel. You need to solve problems of the future -- problems caused as a result of future improvements. Because if you do exactly that, you get to have those future improvements, and that's called advancement.

I see OOo in much that way -- "let's do what microsoft did ten years ago, and let's do it better". That's great. If I had a time-travel machine, and could send OOo to 1998, then it would be a great boost. But in 2009, OOo, if it's better at all, isn't better enough. That makes it just another alternative -- a less mature, less expensive one at that. That's a value proposition, which is a business decision, and nothing more.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Thinboy00]

I hope that there ends up being a way of defining a document such that you can just freaking open it later regardless of what software you decide to migrate to.

That's existed for the longest time^H^H^Ha while now: It's called Unicode.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[HermMunster]

And it's better when it's better, despite it being free.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Rockoon]

Let us know when Open Office becomes better that Microsoft Office.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[jedidiah]

Microsoft Office was nothing special when they bundled it with soundcards
and it still isn't. There is just a sick cult following behind it that
fixates on whatever is perceived to be the "herd choice" while tearing
down anything else. It doesn't have to be "free software". It can be
well established "best of breed" software that it's users still pine for
today 15 years later.

Some of us don't like MS Office and never did and would like it if we
didn't have to ever be bothered with having it forced down out throats
ever again.

The difference between a monopoly a market leader is that you are at
your liberty to completely ignore a market leader.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[jedidiah]

That condition is ENTIRELY artificial.

It is an artifact of planned obsolescence. This is something
that companies that sell software use to artificially create
demand in their product so that people will continue to buy
something when they don't really need to.

RTF became popular because real requirements allow it to be
useful despite the fact that the format is ancient.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

Two things. First, "herd choice" is a good thing, and a feature, when you want to do something as a herd. That's the world of business -- it's all about the herd.

Second, WordPerfect was, and probably still is fantastic. Where'd it go? Why did OOo appear when WP was already mature?

Is anyone here using the new Corel WP? I'd bet way more are using OOo. So your point about choosing a non-market leader just doesn't fly. You can always cohose WordPerfect.

It just so happens that in the business world, you want to be using the same software as everyone else -- the same as your clients, the same as your suppliers. It could be anything, but it has to be the most popular. That's a bonafide feature, and it can be a very important one.

If you want to say that ms office is a monopoly in so far as it's the only one to be able to offer that one feature, then sure that's true. But there are plenty of other office suites out there. Use them if you like. And if you can get a vast majority of people to use it, then it can become the new herd choice. And then you can complain that that new company is evil.

Perhaps the only way to satisfy you would be to have multiple companies produce multiple suites which all read the same file format, in exactly the same way. Well then by all means design that format, put together your rule book, and get people to follow it if you like. But you can't force an existing company to alter their products to suit your new rule book if they don't want to.

That's their freedom, and it's important to them -- and to me for my business.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

But that's their right to do. That's a freedom that any company gets to exercise. You are free to build a product that becomes useless over time.

And hey, virtually every tangible product does. Your washing machine likely doesn't survive 5 years. A good one ten years. And a really good one twenty years.

MS Office 1995 files still work just as well. And Office 2007 can still produce '95 files.

So it would seem that your complaint is that a company's products don't last for, what, 100 years? 200 years? 2'000 years?

I own and operate two companies. My products don't last 100 years either. I'm not interested in supporting them that long; and I'm not interested in having them cost enough for me to build them quite that well.

What product do you produce? How long does it last?

Now I certainly see your desire to have *information* last for thousands of years. And that's cool. But I don't think it's appropriate to have the creator of an office suite be responsible for ensuring taht retention, do you?

It would seem that _historians_ and _librarians_ and an industry of archivers would be responsible for taking whatever is the current format, and neutering it into an archivable format -- and converting those archives into modern formats as things change over time. You know, just like the way old paper books are kept, maintained, archived, and restored.

I build metal boxes. My metal boxes are designed to serve a 5 to 10 year purpose, with maintenance and cleaning. It's a metal box. If you want to keep it for 200 years, you probably can. It's a metal box. It will likely last. But I don't sell it with a 200 years warranty, nor with a 200 yeras service plan. If you use it as a time-capsule, you're not going to hold me responsible for any anti-worm features, or anti-corosion features, or anything else. That's not what I'm selling.

So if you were to look at MS Office as a program used to create files for present and medium-term future use (10 years), then it serves your needs quite well.

If you want software that is designed to have its files used for hundreds of years, then MS office isn't the right choice. Make a better one. But don't blame ms office. It was never designed for long-term historical features. It was designed to print resumes and reports. It does that well.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Steve001]

Rockoon wrote:

Let us know when Open Office becomes better that Microsoft Office.

I think a more important question is: Does OpenOffice.org meet the needs of the user? If OpenOffice.org meets the needs of the user, why not choose it over MS Office?

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Anonymous Coward]

There is just a sick cult following behind it that fixates on whatever is perceived to be the "herd choice" while tearing
down anything else.

For a minute there, I thought you were talking about GNU/Linux. Now that's truly cult-like software.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[poopdeville]

But the difference in perceived or actual quality might not justify the difference in price. This is especially true for business, where what matters is return on investment.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Steve001]

holophrastic wrote as part of a post:

Second, WordPerfect was, and probably still is fantastic. Where'd it go? Why did OOo appear when WP was already mature?

I think what happened to WordPerfect is that it wasn't able to make the transition to Windows 3.1 fast enough, while MS-Word was ready when Windows 3.1 launched. That delay cost them the leadership in the word processor field at a time when it was competition with many other DOS word processors, including MS Word, WordStar, Professional Write, AmiWord, and PC-Write.

Another factor that worked against WordPerfect (and other word processors) is the integrated office suite. Based on my experience, for a time the integrated office suites had individual applications that tended not to be a good as the standalone applications. This changed with the introduction of MS Office, and the standalone word processors were now competing with an entire suite of applications.

Returing the the subject of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is one of the best word processors I've ever used. However, I gave WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows a try and disliked it so much that I returned to the DOS version after 30 minutes. For a time I worked in an office environment where MS Word, WordPerfect, and WordStar coexisted, but once Windows became the standard PC OS the only word processor that was available to us was MS Word.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Anonymous Coward]

...if it's not better than Microsoft Office (or at least equal).

A thing can be sufficient and yet surpassed.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Rockoon]

Because needs change. It used to be that I didnt need an office suite at all.

..and for the record, I'm using Open Office at home.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[Nefarious Wheel]

Documents aren't washing machines, and metaphors only go so far. We're not talking about reliably cleaning clothes, we're talking about the preservation of knowledge and the passage of information that defines civilisation. When most of the information is in the MS Office proprietary format, there's a huge inertia against changing it to a more neutral format. The problem of one corporation's control over the format may be obviated if there is some way to legally ensure the appropriate version of the reading/writing software will always be available, but that currently isn't the case is it? MSFT has arbitrary control.

Re:Just another feabile attempt

[holophrastic]

But that's just it. You're wanting to force a commercial company to build a product that they aren't building. Certainly that's how MS Office is being used, you're correct, but that doesn't have to be what MS is creating/selling.

If they are just creating a washing machine, or an office suite designed to print documents, and layout resumes, then you can't force them to support your more lofty uses.

Look at it another way. There is a perfectly neutral format that comes out of MS Office. It's called the printed page. And when MS Office was first created, in what, 1985?, the printed page was the long-term storage standard.

So if you were to use MS Office the way that it was originally designed, you'd be printing all of your work, and storing it forever in a perfectly neutral format -- ink and paper.

There may certainly be better ways of doing things, but you can't force a company to be the best. This is the product, take it or leave it. It looks like an aweful lot of people have taken it. Maybe every single one of those users knows that it's a compromise in long-term digital storage, or maybe some of them don't realize what they're sacrificing, but in either case, that's their own decision.

Hey, I drive a car that isn't really as safe as it could be. Quite frankly, it's not very safe at all when compared to other cars. It's a convertible, it's a sports car, and it's only two seats (it's a Mazda MX-5 Miata, and it's more fun than I've ever thought a car could be.).

But obviously, without a roof, it's not very safe if I roll it. And it's very small so it'd get crushed in a collision with a larger vehicle. And, and, and. And the government even lets me put children in the front seat, because there is no back seat. That's right, I'm permitted to endanger the lives of my children in a way that you are forbidden from doing so.

But in the end, we all know why I bought the car. I wanted a convertible. I wanted a sports car. I didn't want to pay for something that is both of those things and also just as safe as something else.

And that's Mazda's right to create such a product. And that's my right to purchase such a product.

Now is not the time to celebrate

[mysidia]

I want to see them succeed beautifully first, and to actually show meaningful improvement after the switch. :)

I'm all for switching to open source software. But MS Office works extremely well. And OO.o is no Firefox.

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[gbjbaanb]

I'm all for switching to open source software. But MS Office works extremely well.

I think that was in the past, Office 2007 is a super slow dog. I thought the days of typing and then looking at the screen to see the letters draw themselves was something I'd never have to see again (unless it was over a particularly slow WAN link), but no - Office 2007 brings that "Retro" feel right on back.

I'm not sure about the others now, no graphical consistency, no real integration with Windows, settings hidden away in menus that are themselves hidden... its all become a bit of a over-engineered mess. Too much code has been added over the years to it.

OO.o may not be the perfect alternative however, but MSO is not the perfect office suite either.

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[mysidia]

I've used all 3... Office 2003, Office 2007, OO.o 3.1.... and never seen Office 2007 to be particularly slow.

Yes, you need much beefier hardware to run Office 2007, than you need to run 2003 or OO. At bare minimum dual core 2.7 GHz on a 64-bit proc, and 4GB of RAM

More is recommended, putting any less on your workstation is asking for trouble.

More CPU power and more RAM is strongly recommended, especially when running on Vista. The beefier hardware is part of the cost of running the latest and greatest versions.

It sounds like you might have a hardware problem.. :)

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[NervousNerd]

I've run Office 2007 on a Via C7 (1.5GHz) with a gig of RAM, and it ran decently. Not quite as fast as Office 2003, but fast enough.

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[Gudeldar]

IBM's Lotus Symphony may be based on OO.o but it is not open source. Sun originally dual licensed OO.o under the GPL and their own BSD style license, IBM took the BSD-style licensed version and developed Lotus Symphony.

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[gbjbaanb]

I've only got a dual-CPU Xeon running at 2.8Ghz with 3Gb RAM. Pity me for my inconsequential hardware specs, I take it back Microsoft, turns out it was my fault all along, Office's not bloated after all :(

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[temcat]

I tried Office 2007 and uninstalled it in 30 minutes because I quickly got to hate the new UI. However, as far as basic performance goes, I was pleasantly surprised. It was somewhat slower, but not much. Some colleagues reported though that add-on applications relying on VBA had become significantly slower.

Re:Now is not the time to celebrate

[mysidia]

No... Office 2007 is bloated as hell. (Office 2003 and OO.o are quite bloated, also)

The bloat is one of the negatives; just as (for MS Office but not OO), the vendor lock-in is one of the negatives.

Nevertheless, the MS Office products are very useful, very good at what they are designed for.

The Office Products are well enough polished (in terms of graphics design) that OO.o looks poor compared to them, to MS Office users.

And in many cases, for large enterprises, the cost of upgrade to 2007, and the cost of the additional hardware, is less than the cost of switching to OO.o.

Due to required document conversion projects, and required efforts to "patch" and fix important documents that don't convert properly.

Having had close experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, this is nothing new. Getting a license for Office 2007 at IBM is an impossible task and has been so since it was released. Office 2003 was the last version that IBM had a volume license for.

Lotus Symphony is an unholy abomination. Coming from the same people who gave us that paragon of usability Lotus Notes, now they mixed eclipse RCP with OO.o and came up with what can possibly be the worst productivity set of tools ever. The only benefit it has is it integrates well with Lotus Notes and that's about it.

/rant

Re:Having had close experience

[lukas84]

Many IBM sales reps here are using Powerpoint 2007. Most of them bought MLK licenses through their expenses account.

Re:Having had close experience

[Anonymous Coward]

What's an MLK license?

Is it a license for racial equality?

(Apologizes to Dr. King's family)

Instant feedback

[dbcad7]

It's genius.. by actually using the product day to day, they will discover it's strengths and weaknesses and know what changes they need to focus on. That they have not done this from day one is the amazing part.

Re:Instant feedback

[Rockoon]

They didnt use it because they knew the weaknesses already. That hasnt changed.. so I guess a new manager decided to justify himself?

Re:Instant feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Genius in that they'll make a million users hate it even more. Once you get use to sirloin its hard to go back to ground beef.

Heh, some things never change...

[supremebob]

I used be an IBM employee, and I can remember the corporate mandate that ALL IBM internal documents had to be made in Lotus SmartSuite instead of Microsoft Office. Guess what... most folks still used Office instead. The primary reason was that SmartSuite sucked, and was about five years behind Office in terms of ease of use and functionality. IBM never bothered to regularly update it as well, leaving it in some 1997-era timewarp when the rest of the world was using Office 2003.

I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner. Combine that with thousands of customer facing workers that NEED to use Microsoft Office to ensure total compatibility, and you're going to have a hell of a time getting everyone to switch.
 

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[slim]

Guess what... most folks still used Office instead.

Not in my department. How on earth did "most folks" get an Office license from the IBM beancounters?

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

Actually the user interface to Lotus Symphony is pretty decent. (better than OO's anyway)

Its problems are that it takes an ice age to start and its OO.org code is from OpenOffice 2 so it's always playing catch up for the file formats.

What's needed is someone to do similar what Apple did with khtml. Get something like koffice, improve the code even more, stick a good user interface on there and make sure it launches relatively quickly.

At the moment i'm in the process of gradually moving over the company I work for from Office 2000 to Open Office. The single consistent biggest complaint (apart from a certain office suite file compatibility) is the speed (and lack thereof) of its launch time.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, Symphony, written in Java, based on SWT and the Eclipse framework. I just can't wait to try it.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[larien]

I got Smartsuite bundled with a PC in the 90s and have to agree it sucked - it was OK for basic letters, but not much more than that...

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't go over well in the accounting and finance offices where some of the spreadsheet jockies have a bunch of ODBC links between Excel and Access, or complex pivot tables and lists.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[yuna49]

The single consistent biggest complaint (apart from a certain office suite file compatibility) is the speed (and lack thereof) of its launch time.

Just curious since I don't use OpenOffice on Windows (I use Linux), but doesn't having OO preload its libraries speed up launch times?

From what I recall, what made Microsoft Office appear to launch so quickly was that most of the dll's it needs are started at boot time. (Helps when you control both the OS and the apps it runs.) I thought the prelauncher, or whatever it's called, was introduced with OpenOffice 2.0 or perhaps even one of the later releases in the 1.x series.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[supremebob]

Your department actually bought licenses for all of the software that it used? ;)

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[gtbritishskull]

Really? 90s? You do realise it is 2009, right. Software can change A LOT in 10+ years.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they have any kind of probability of receiving files from Customers.

Or use WWGPE.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[swillden]

I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner.

From my perspective, this mostly just means that I no longer have to provide MS Office versions of my work to my colleagues. Because Linux is my platform of choice, I use OO.o, and it's been annoying me for years that I have to save to .xsl, .doc and .ppt before I can send my documents to my co-workers. No longer. I'll send ODF files and anyone who complains will get a polite referral to the new policy (probably along with an MS Office version of that particular file, just because I'm a nice guy).

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[swillden]

I got Smartsuite bundled with a PC in the 90s and have to agree it sucked - it was OK for basic letters, but not much more than that...

That was the response from a lot of people who didn't understand how to use it. In fact, Word Pro (and it's predecessor, Ami Pro) were far more powerful than WordPerfect or MS Word, and were actually easier to use once you understood why all formatting had to be done through styles. As for not being good for more than letters, I know several people who published beautifully laid-out, high-quality manuals for years using these tools. They argued that they Ami Pro and Word Pro were almost as powerful as desktop publishing systems, but far easier to use and much less expensive. MS Word and WordPerfect weren't even in the same ballpark.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Hurricane78]

Ey, nothing against my SmartSuite! in 2003, of course it was outdated. But pre-2000, it was the best office suite ever made! And it's still my "best ever" one. It's just that IBM abandoned it and did let it die like a dog! But that's not the software's fault. The InfoBox was still way ahead of its time. FYI: MS Office 2007's ribbon is a bad imitation of the InfoBox, merged with menus and icon bars.

Symphony immediately reminded me of trying to revive its best concepts. Unfortunately the last time I looked, it was missing pretty much everything, and under the hood it looked like a weird OOo. Not that OOo is not a big piece of crap for being just like MS Office already. (Or rather the other way around. :)
Hmm... when I think about it, this means that Symphony actually was more like MS Works! ^^

I hope they will make Symphony into a modern open source SmartSuite. I really do. I miss WordPro. :/

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet you will...

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[supremebob]

The problem problem with SmartSuite is that it DIDN'T change much in the past ten years. They basically gave up making any major improvements to it around 1999.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[diamondsw]

I may be wrong (I'm still on Office XP by choice), but don't we have a site license out on ISSI?

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

For quite a while (maybe the last 8 or 10 years), all laptops have come with Office installed, or it could be installed with the corporate license from ISSI (IBM Standard Software Install). For a while (maybe 3-5 years) many people had Office and SmartSuite installed side by side. It was quite common to find content (primarily presentations) that was in teamrooms or sent from upper level management, in SmartSuite format. It was also (weirdly) quite common to get patent drafts back from attorneys in SmartSuite format. However, SmartSuite content has now almost completely faded away (except for some old stuff lying around).

So, now we will (eventually) migrate to something different. I haven't used OO except for a few quick glances. My suspicion is that anyone who writes a paper for a conference and then has to use the conference's format template, or anyone who works on a standards committee, will just end up taking a lot of work home so they can use real Office applications.

Having been with IBM for over 25 years, I can say that we're never supplied with what we want, and we're often not supplied with what we need, but we're resourceful, and no matter how much the execs cut costs, we find a way to get the work done.

(By the way, if an IBM exec says "we're not doing this to save money", that's when you know that they're doing it to save money.)

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 90's I used SmartSuite (primarily the word processor) when writing technical documentation. All of that documentation was structured and formatted based on the standards created by/for Xerox and published in a hard to find and expensive book (well worth finding though...).

One of my clients had a close relationship with IBM and was able to get templates which had been created at IBM for their own technical writing; also based on the Xerox standards. Apparently at that time the technical writing department at IBM had office space near the developers of SmartSuite, so they made sure that the word processor could reliably and ably support the Xerox standards.

When you tried to setup MS Word to support those same layouts it would puke and die. Microsoft may have improved Word over the years, but it still sucks when writing technical documents - although not as badly as it did in the past.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[curmudgeous]

(I was a long time IBM'r until the Spring cullings...)

There are install packages on ISSI, but if you read the fine print it states that you have to get a license key through the proper channels. You can install it all day long but it won't work without a key.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Orion Blastar]

They got assigned IBM PC machines that came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Up until MS-Office 2007 the license key was included on pre-installed PCs. IBM had a license with Microsoft to pre-load MS-Windows on their brand PCs and Laptops (Lenovo in modern times IIRC).

Sometime around 1999 IBM stopped pre-loading Lotus Smartsuite and was forced by Microsoft to pre-load MS-Office or lose their OEM status. More modern versions of Microsoft Windows break Lotus Smartsuite compatibilities by the way, which is why people like me had to abandon it. I am glad that IBM Lotus Symphony can work with MS-Office and IBM Lotus Smartsuite files as well as OO.o and ODF file formats. If it has a decent spell check and grammar check I may even stop using MS-Office XP (2002) and convert over to IBM Lotus Symphony.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[MemoryDragon]

Actually I had a look at symphony when the beta came out it was quite ok. It was more or less a bugfixed openoffice embedded in an Eclipse frame for easy access (very similar of what you get if you add the OpenOffice plugins to eclipse but tighter integrated).

Not too bad, ahead of OpenOffice 3.0 bugfixwise, but not really graphically fancy like the ribbon interface.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Antiocheian]

Is this bug fixed in Symphony?

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what... most folks still used Office instead.

Not in my department. How on earth did "most folks" get an Office license from the IBM beancounters?

They didn't. Just downloaded and used a pirated copy ( :) Huh, I wouldn't know, wasn't actually there!)

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I still have a problem with MS with this. MS Office is not very compatible with MS Office. I now always also request the pdf as well. So I can compare. The pdf, is usually a better representation of what the document looked like on the other computer.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[temcat]

From what I recall, what made Microsoft Office appear to launch so quickly was that most of the dll's it needs are started at boot time.

This is a myth. Office 2003 under Wine starts as fast as under Windows if not faster.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[JAlexoi]

I bet they will just cancel the license and download/install option if not pre-installed on new computers. So you would probably have to ask for a license whenever you actually need one. Most people will find that very little number of people actually need the functionality, even at IBM.

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Lotus Symphony were anything like OpenOffice 3, me and all my colleagues would definitely use it. However, Lotus Symphony is still based on OpenOffice 1.x...

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what ? They didnt :-)

Re:Heh, some things never change...

[diamondsw]

Ah, I wasn't aware of that - I set up my laptop in 2006, and haven't had to rebuild it yet (knock on plastic).

And I'm sorry to hear that - I also lost a number of good coworkers in the April layoffs. That seems to have been the worst one in years. Good luck on the job hunt, and be glad you're out. ;-)

Every Product Requires Support

[HermMunster]

Those parts of my career that were in support of software, either as a help desk or as network admin with additional duties, required a large amount of support for every program we used. In corporate environments to small business the use of Office required significant support efforts by everyone. Claims that OOo requires more support than others is specious. One can make a heavy bet and know that you'd win in judging that those people making that claim have no experience supporting others on either platform or have never used Open Office. I've watched many firms take OOo, and though there was a learning curve, use it to good advantage.

Because you don't like OOo doesn't mean it doesn't work and do the job it is supposed to do. I use it. Millions of others use it. The few people here disrespecting it (without showing proof they actually know anything about it) demonstrates the specious nature of anything they might write about it or any competing product.

Re:Every Product Requires Support

[Blakey Rat]

On the other hand, most of the people in these threads who say that everybody can use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office aren't office application users.

Re:Every Product Requires Support

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other other hand, most of the people in these threads who say they can't use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office are fucking fooling themselves. At the absolute worst, OpenOffice is at least equal to MS Office of 5 years ago, and if folks believe they couldn't use that Office, or even an Office older than that, they're so full of shit they're bursting at the fucking seems.

Re:Every Product Requires Support

[uninformedLuddite]

Agreed! there is a big difference between using an office suite fully and productively and writing your mum a letter from college in MS-Word.

Re:Every Product Requires Support

[Blakey Rat]

MS Office 5 years ago has a way of viewing the same document in two columns, side-by-side. It also has Normal View, and a far more functional Outline View.

There are many features Office has had longer than 5 years that OpenOffice still doesn't have. To say otherwise is just demonstrating that you're one of those people who is unqualified to judge which is the better product, because you don't use Office products enough.

And I'm not even claiming that I'm in that group, either. But I've used enough MS Office and enough OpenOffice to know about the two things I've pointed out up there.

Whooopeeeee

[tengeta]

Not like IBM's "version" of OpenOffice is free. Its proprietary and costs you money, like Microsoft's Evil Office. Seriously stop calling it OO.o, it makes 90% of military acronyms actually make sense, and that is messed up.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[binarylarry]

The important part is that it uses the same files as OpenOffice and is fully compatible.

To Microsoft, their proprietary formats are the most valuable part of the office suite, it's where there control stems from.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[rivercityrandom]

I downloaded Lotus Symphony for free off of their website. I had to give them my email address, but it didn't cost me money. It is definitely proprietary, however, and in my experience it really doesn't do anything that OpenOffice.org doesn't already do. But it does support open formats, and if enough big companies like IBM promote ODF and things like that, it might make it easier for non-Microsoft office suites to compete in the market and share data with each other.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[gtbritishskull]

Exactly. While I can choose to pay money for whatever improvements that IBM has made to OpenOffice, I can also choose not to and get a free alternative. This gives me the choice to only pay IBM if their product is good, instead of paying for a program that plays nice with a file format. If I want to edit MS Office documents, I have to buy the program from Microsoft. No matter how good or bad it is.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[hullabalucination]

Not like IBM's "version" of OpenOffice is free. Its proprietary and costs you money...

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/nochargesearch.jsp?cat=&q0=&pf=&k=ALL&pn=&pid=&rs=&S_TACT=104CBW71&status=Active&S_CMP=&b=&sr=1&q=symphony+1.3&ibm-search=Search

* * * * *

I'd horse whip you, if I only had a horse!
—Groucho Marx

Re:Whooopeeeee

[Minozake]

Seriously stop calling it OO.o, it makes 90% of military acronyms
actually make sense, and that is messed up.

Its proper name is OpenOffice.org. Thereby we derive the acronym OO.o. I'm
generally an advocate of calling products and people by their actual proper
nouns rather than a shorter or insulting name.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[shutdown -p now]

Among other things you have to keep in mind that Symphony is based in OO.org 1.x. This is two major released behind the main product.

Re:Whooopeeeee

[ClosedSource]

Are you sure? Let's look it up on G.c

Implications

[under_score]

This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?

As well, as a Mac user myself, and for others using non-MS systems, it will be nice to be able to tell people that IBM uses OpenOffice.org (which will be the shortcut way of telling them that they are using an in-house customized version...) as an incentive / emotional proof that OOo is viable for their own use.

Re:Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

As well, as a Mac user myself, and for others using non-MS systems, it will be nice to be able to tell people that IBM uses OpenOffice.org (which will be the shortcut way of telling them that they are using an in-house customized version...) as an incentive / emotional proof that OOo is viable for their own use.

Of course! How nice it is to see that Apple users are above proprietary bullshit like MS.

Fucking hypocrite.

Your rant has nothing to do with open anything. It's just another wild bash at MS.

Re:Implications

[ClaraBow]

At my school, the business teacher's argument is that everyone uses MS. Office and therefore must be taught to all students without consideration for alternatives will no longer be a valid point! It will be much easier to support Open Office, when such a big player is using it. Not to mention that we can get it for free -- surely that is a compelling selling point in these times of economical difficulty, especially at schools.

Re:Implications

[blind biker]

This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?

If they use Lotus Symphony, they are using ODF already!

Re:Implications

[epine]

That's not the deepest post ever, but at least it circles around the right point: the "official" designation carries a lot of clout, both inside and outside IBM, even if the decree is more honoured in the breach. What it amounts to is the declaration within IBM that "no one will ever get fired for using ODF". Less job security for anyone who creates a Word document with embedded Silverlight, or other embrace and distend shenanigans.

Canada has been officially metric since the 1970s. In the local grocery store, the meat package labels display the price per kg. Deli meats are ordinarily purchase in multiples of 100g. Very few people use kg verbally. We all cook with recipes in cups and pounds.

The display sign-age is another matter altogther. For fruit, price per pound "as advertised" or "manager's special" or "everyday low price" (the later catches the reading impaired who purchase based on its similarity to the other two).

On the roads, speed limits are posted in km/h, odometers read distince in km, but we normally discuss fuel efficiency in MPG. I've only recently internalized litres/100km. The stickiness of MPG baffles me. The international vagaries of the gallon is one of the reasons we switched to metric in the first place. Maybe one person in ten knows the precise relationship of the American and Canadian gallon off the top of their head. Fortunately you can Google "UK gallon in US gallon". Interesting: it now accepts "UK gallon", "British gallon", and "Imperial gallon" as synonyms. I don't think it used to be quite so forgiving.

Google translates "Irish gallon" to 0.0775 kegs. No, just kidding.

I'm just saying that Canada is now forty years into sanctified ambivalence. It's time to stop being surprised that not all policies contain pitchforks, or that compliance is often arms-length.

For the younger generation who have never known anything different, I get the feeling that the imperial system has become a kind of "folk measurement" completely unlike the classical measurement you study in school.

I won't miss the Imperial Word one bit.

Re:Implications

[LordLimecat]

If a teacher thinks that Office has to be "taught" (rather than how to use a generic document editor), I would question his expertise to make such a statement.

Re:Implications

[rdebath]

Schools can usually get MS Office for free, the discount code is "Linux".

Re:Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

At my school (where I teach) we rolled out open office to replace word.

The most vocal detractors have been the teachers and not the students, blaming if consitantly for many ills even though the teachers all get office too. I often work on stuff at home in open office and then convert and have no problems with it.

One staff member was asked to do an unbiased evaluation and admitted they already decided MS office was better and just didn't bother. The rot is that deep!

However, the lack of a decent grammar checking package in oo is a real drawback for our students who are supposed to write research papers.

Re:Implications

[iamhigh]

However, the lack of a decent grammar checking package in oo is a real drawback for our students who are supposed to write research papers.

Uhhh... for students that are learning the proper way to write (or should have already), that sounds like a feature not a bug!

How about Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will Oracle decide to stop funding anti-competitive ventures and switch fully to ODF and OpenOffice? The trouble that M$ causes Oracle directly, can be added up, probably accurately. For every 1 penny spent on MS Office or helping maintain the market share of MS Office formats, n more is lost from Oracle from M$ antics.

Facts wrong again

[Anonymous Coward]

I just have a hard time taking /. seriously. Oracle is buying Sun. IBM isn't.

How the hell are we supposed to trust this source for any news when it's always wrong.

Re:Facts wrong again

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an idiot? Where in the article did it say IBM was buying Sun?

Re:Facts wrong again

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

The last line in the summary reads:

Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past their acquisition of Sun instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony.

Re:Facts wrong again

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it says, "Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony."

Try a copy and paste next time instead of trying to remember, your reading comprehension and/or short term memory need work.

Re:Facts wrong again

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

It was changed then - I copy'n'pasted from the RSS feed summary! Also, if I'd written that from memory, I think that'd be a huge improvement for me. ;)

Re:Facts wrong again

[ClosedSource]

Yes, I saw the early version too. The interesting question is whether the original was a typo or did the author actually believe it was IBM that was going to acquire Sun? Does the statement still make sense after being corrected, or should it have been deleted?

There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

It rather annoys and even pisses me off that so many important business tools are written with dependencies on MS Office. That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.

I once worked for a firm where a contract writing program that requires MS Office and, if I recall correctly, Adobe Acrobat Professional. What a huge waste of money!? Not only was this "application" quite expensive, but so are the dependencies involved... and on top of that, the application was only valid for a year. Upon learning about this situation, I had two thoughts. One was related to the old saying about a fool and his money, and the other was that my hopes of saving the company any money by going to OO.o was a lot more challenging.

Using more F/OSS in business requires that people are mindful of the applications and the dependencies [lock-in] that they bring. Moving away from commercial and proprietary isn't as simple as replacing one app with another. There are often deeper considerations.

The danger of lock-in isn't usually apparent or obvious to people who buy apps. Quite often IT isn't even involved in that decision.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Rockoon]

That is, of course, Microsoft's intention and the primary reason for the existence of a programming language built into the office suite.

If your contention is that VBA isnt useful, then explain the billions of lines of VBA code in the world. Integration with the suite is just one of the things that makes the alternatives like Open Office non-competitive. Your idea that VBA is just there as a lock-in is silly.

To translate your argument to reality: "Features that customers use extensively, when the competition doesnt have them, is only a lock-in"

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

With an open format you write applications that do *stuff* to a file. With a closed format, you use the tools in the proprietary suite to do your *stuff*. In the first case, it's simply a matter of a stand-alone application, in the second case, any "applications" require Office to be installed. You don't think Microsoft chose the second for a reason?

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

My contention is that the reality of the presence of VBA is not necessary for an office suite. It never has been and never will be. Various external APIs say so.

I don't say it isn't useful -- don't be so defensive. But it is a problem in that VBA applications are a great deal more costly because they are not stand-alone and as a result, the user has to buy other things in order to use the application they want to use.

Customers do not often use VBA. Customers use applications that use VBA.

VBA is actually a dangerous thing as it takes an ordinarily trustworthy document and transforms it into a potential carrier for malware infection. It has been done before and continues to be done. There are certain things that shouldn't be done and including a programming language as low and as powerful as VBA gives even entry-level script-kiddies the ability to cause major problems. VBA is bad just as Active-X is bad.

The reasons that other office suites do not provide similar functionality isn't because they "can't." It's because they know they shouldn't. People who care about security and the like concern themselves with the limitations they can provide in order to protect the users. VBA (and Active-X) grant user level access to the machine and quite often require administrator level access which users have been shown more than willing to grant. (This is irrelevant since there are known exploits that cannot be patched in Win32 without breaking every application ever written that enables privilege escalation)

The purpose of VBA is to take an office applications suite and convert it into an operating platform.

If it is somehow appropriate for documents to carry executable code, then why not pictures, sounds and video? Should email carry executable code? Is it appropriate for web pages to carry executable code that isn't sandboxed and limited? From where I sit, for the same reasons all the other common file types shouldn't contain executable code, office documents shouldn't.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[stagg]

On the other hand, most professional publishers insist on .rtf format, which is somewhat cross platform.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[swissmonkey]

(This is irrelevant since there are known exploits that cannot be patched in Win32 without breaking every application ever written that enables privilege escalation)

I would love to have you clearly articulate those known exploits that cannot be patched in Win32 And I bet you won't be able to, why ? Because they don't exist.
Hint: I'm a security engineer, watch what you're saying.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/5408/discuss

Okay, how about that one? It was announced and discussed quite a few years ago. How could a security engineer not know about this?

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

RTF is incapable of containing malicious code and is based on well documented standards. (I say incapable in the sense that it doesn't host executable code by definition... it may be capable if an exploit were found in the reading functions in a given application software and used as a mean of compromising the application and the system it is running on.) It's likely why RTF was created in the first place. It is news to me, however, that professional publishers insist on it.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[swissmonkey]

Vista and Win7 are protected against that attack(concept of low-medium-high integrity processes and processes can only send messages to same or lower integrity) and they have done so without breaking the apps.

Sorry, doesn't fit what you claimed.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[erroneus]

Most people who use Windows use XP. Bad argument and you probably already know that. You probably also knew about the message queue vulnerability... didn't you? A professional would know. And I wouldn't be too sure that 32 bit Vista or 7 could effectively patch the problem without changing the Win32 message queue and breaking compatibility. Do you have any references to cite this achievement? Preferably one that explains why it isn't fixed in WindowsXP.

I've read through your comment history a bit. You might as well add a signature that says "I'm a Microsoft shill."

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a document management application in a previous job, and at the time Microsoft Office was the only easy way to do any form of document automation, and the APIs were easy to find and easy to follow, and there were working examples to do so all over the internet.

The company that this document management software was created for wanted NOTHING to do with OpenOffice.

At the time, the API for OpenOffice was disgusting, and the code was bulky and overwhelming. A simple "open --> change --> close" operation in OOo Writer was hundreds of lines of code, versus about 10 lines of code using Microsoft Office Word.

Since then, there's been some advancements with both OpenOffice, and the scripting languages that can interface with OpenOffice, so that developers can program against it more easily (such as with Eclipse, Groovy, NetBeans and many others).

This still doesn't change the fact that the OOo compatibility isn't nearly as demanded as the Microsoft equivalent, but it's a start.

That said, I say "good for IBM" and they're moving in a direction that will ultimately help the free world. Whether every IBM executive switches to Symphony or not is a moot point, the fact that they're making it a standard for the entire company should inspire everyone that supports FOSS.

I've used Lotus Notes in Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu, and it's a great product (sometimes it's IS a bit slow). I can only imagine Symphony is equally as sound.

Hopefully IBM can help show that OOo APIs can act as solutions to business needs and more places will adopt the excellent technology.

-Tres

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[BikeHelmet]

Oh man, I'm definitely not hiring you. Haha!

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[swissmonkey]

You probably also knew about the message queue vulnerability... didn't you? A professional would know.

If you're talking about the one you cited, yes, for years. It's a very moderate vuln actually, even on XP / Windows Server 2003

And I wouldn't be too sure that 32 bit Vista or 7 could effectively patch the problem without changing the Win32 message queue and breaking compatibility. Do you have any references to cite this achievement?

Look at MSDN : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625963.aspx

Preferably one that explains why it isn't fixed in WindowsXP.

That is very simple: the changes are extensive, too big to be ported back.

I've read through your comment history a bit. You might as well add a signature that says "I'm a Microsoft shill."

Oh right, since I don't talk shit about MS like you do, I must be a Microsoft shill... Now I could go take a look at your comment history and tell you you're a [some insult], but what good would that be ? That would say more about me than you.

The reality is, I'm right and you're wrong, you had no idea what you were talking about and got caught red handed.
Calling others shills won't change any of that.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Rockoon]

VBA does more than stuff "to a file" - and thats the point - businesses are using VBA for things that are impossible with programs that can only "do stuff to files."

Microsoft Office is highly integrated because thats what businesses want, and its no surprise that Open Office has some integration as well.

Why dont you try selling the strong points of Open Office to us instead of spewing your opinion about Microsoft Office? Whats the matter.. dont have any convincing arguments? Afraid that for anything you bring up, I can point to Microsoft Office and declare unequivocally that it does it better? All you've got is the ODF argument, and businesses just dont care.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[StuartHankins]

Wow you sound ignorant. For a "security engineer" you need more training, or more exposure to the real world.

HINT: The real world doesn't run Vista or Windows 7 in a business environment. The ones who run Windows tend to run XP, which is a sieve security-wise. The latest unpatchable exploits are just another demonstration of the lack of security focus at Microsoft, which if you've been around long at all you must recognize as a pattern.

As for the "shill" comment -- considering your comment history, one has to wonder if you are being paid for your comments, as they fly in the face of reality as we know it. Of course the possibility is that you're some Best Buy or Office Depot employee playing "security engineer" on the weekends. In either event, I pity you.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[swissmonkey]

Wow you sound ignorant. For a "security engineer" you need more training, or more exposure to the real world.

HA, HA, HA

HINT: The real world doesn't run Vista or Windows 7 in a business environment. The ones who run Windows tend to run XP, which is a sieve security-wise.

And ? The guy talks about issues that are supposedly unfixable in Win32, Vista and Win7 prove he's wrong. Nobody ever talked about market share.

The latest unpatchable exploits are just another demonstration of the lack of security focus at Microsoft, which if you've been around long at all you must recognize as a pattern.

Latest unpatchable exploits ? Which ones ? Come on, instead of insulting people when they don't spit on MS like you do, why don't you bring FACTS ?!?

Lack of security focus at MS ? Yeah, I suggest you go talk to guys like Dan Kaminsky, Chris Paget and others to see who in their opinion is a leader in developing secure software, you're up for a serious surprise. But then, you wouldn't know, you probably never talked to them since you don't seem to have a clue about what secure software is.

As for the "shill" comment -- considering your comment history, one has to wonder if you are being paid for your comments, as they fly in the face of reality as we know it.

That's right, not spitting on MS all day long like you guys make me a shill.
But then again, facts show that I'm right. Now, does being right make me a shill ? Or is it simply because you dislike reality that you hide behind this "you're a shill" shield ?

Of course the possibility is that you're some Best Buy or Office Depot employee playing "security engineer" on the weekends. In either event, I pity you.

You're right, I *might* be your boss in that department store

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Steve001]

erroneus wrote:

RTF is incapable of containing malicious code and is based on well documented standards. (I say incapable in the sense that it doesn't host executable code by definition... it may be capable if an exploit were found in the reading functions in a given application software and used as a mean of compromising the application and the system it is running on.) It's likely why RTF was created in the first place. It is news to me, however, that professional publishers insist on it.

From what I understand, RTF was created to allow documents to travel from one word processor to another while retaining the basic formatting (bold, underlining, and so on). Part of the reason for its creation was that there was trouble moving documents from one version of MS Word to another.

Despite its age, I think the reason that RTF still remains in use is that: (1) it works well as a basic word processing format, and (2) just about every word processor can directly read it. As far as its use by profession publishers goes, I think (just my opinion) that the reason it would be used is that RTF is good at retaining basic in-line text formatting in a document, while being able to be easily converted into other formats.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[cbhacking]

It would take a pretty major change to add process integrity into WinXP. Basically, integrity is another type of security characteristic (along with owner and group) found in every process. Whenever a process wants to do something, Windows checks whether it has permission to do that thing, based on the security descriptors and access controls. For example, suppose your Windows process wants to open a file for writing. On XP, the ACL of the file is checked against the user and group of the process. On Vista and up, the integrity characteristic is also checked. This is how IE7/8's Protected Mode sandbox works - the browser runs as a Low Integrity process, and can't write to locations that aren't also marked as Low Integrity.

In the context of shatter attacks, Windows permits any window to pass messages to any other window, regardless of the traditional ACLs. However, on Vista and above, a Low Integrity process can't send messages to a window owned by a process with Medium, High, or System Integrity. Similarly, a process with Medium Integrity (most programs a user opens) can't send messages to windows owned by High Integrity processes (typically set by starting a process using UAC elevation). You get the idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Integrity_Control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Interface_Privilege_Isolation
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625963.aspx

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time when VBA was a create solution to writing a quick and dirty app to do something quickly easier.

Sometimes the ballooned into monstrosities that should have been written in a real programming environment.

However that time was about 1995-1997.

There are better ways now...

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have a very valid point, but I think you may be underestimating how useful VBA is, especially in the case of Excel. VBA turns what would otherwise be a simple spreadsheet application into something much more versatile. For instance, I spend much of my time using MATLAB and/or Octave to write various simulations. This is easy for me, since my university has MATLAB licenses, and I have admin rights on my PC to install octave if I wish. However, for many professionals this will not be the case -- luckily, they probably have a copy of MS Office available, which will do the trick quite well for a small one off job. Not the most efficient, but certainly cheaper in the long run than a MATLAB license. I have been in this situation a number of times, and VBA has been a great friend.

Being a mechanical engineer, I know little about the workings behind VBA -- but does it need to be so insecure? For what I've used it for/seen it used for, I can't see why Open Office couldn't include something providing the same functionality without the security issues....

Of course, if a company was happy to use Open Office, I guess installing Octave wouldn't be an issue....

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I herd you like VBA so we put an app in your app so you can parse while you parse.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[ClosedSource]

When VBA was created, what was the open format that most word processors used - there wasn't any.

In addition VBA can leverage a user's knowledge of Office to create their application by starting with a recorded macro.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[cheesybagel]

It is often joked that a computer application has only reached maturity when it has its own built-in computer language. Emacs has EmacsLisp, AutoCAD has AutoLISP, GIMP has Script-Fu, so why should not Office have VBA? What I do agree thought is that scripts should not be bundled with the documents themselves. That opens a whole can of worms. But then again, HTML also can include embedded Javascript, so it is not as if Microsoft are the only ones guilty of this sin.

Re:There is a LOT that uses MS Office

[cheesybagel]

You're right, I *might* be your point haired boss in that department store

There, fixed that.

OP making up his own story

[saleenS281]

First, i4i in no way "absolved" OO.o of anything. What they DID do was say they don't "believe" it infringes. That's code for "we're going milk all the money we can out of MS, then we'll figure out who else we can sue".

Second, the MS i4i suit has absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic at hand. Why was it even brought up? Cmon guys, enough of the MS bashing. It's to the point it has to be brought up in stories about completely different products now?

Re:OP making up his own story

[stagg]

I believe the OP was attempting to add some analysis to the article by suggesting that the MS i4i suit might play a role in helping this to break Microsoft's hold on the word processor market and start a new standard format. Or at least a diversity of formats.

Why is this article tagged "opensource"

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wikipedia: "OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4 was dual licensed under both the GNU Lesser General Public License and Sun's own SISSL, which allowed for entities to change the code without releasing their changes. Therefore, IBM does not have to release the source code of Symphony."

This is about as open as MS Office. I defy anyone to find me the source code for Symphony posted on the net.

While this only makes sense that IBM uses it's own office suite it's not a win for open source.

Re:Why is this article tagged "opensource"

[binarylarry]

Actually this is a big win for open source users.

Now you're completely safe using OOo when you interact with IBM and not have to worry if they're using Microsoft Office. And that means other companies can switch more easily as well. It's like dominos.

It's about the formats, stupid! :)

Re:Why is this article tagged "opensource"

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

It's a win for ODF though!

Re:Why is this article tagged "opensource"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can use these same formats from within MS Office. You're the one who's stupid.

There is no win for open source here.

Cunning...

[welshbyte]

...one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony...

This is actually an ingenious way for IBM to stress test its hardware - a third of a million internal Symphony bug reports all hitting the server at the same time. Beat that, Oracle.

A Bit Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit of a disclaimer here: I work for IBM.

With that said, the change wasn't as much as an ideological shift to OO software more than it was a licensing issue. The simple fact was that it is quite expensive for MS Office licenses for the entire company. Lotus Symphony has been available to employees for years, but it hasn't really been forced until three or so months ago when a program was pushed to workstations that removed MS Office and installed the Symphony suite if you did not already have it(default builds come with Symphony on it anyway, so it didn't really need to be installed on many workstations). Now if you want a copy of MS Office on your IBM workstation, you have to have a legitimate business need to order it or you can use your own personal copy if you so choose. There are hardly any instances of the former case happening.

It was stated before by another thread here by an ex IBMer that SmartSuite was the default for IBM documents and that people used Office anyway. Yes, that is true. The reason that is true is that Office had become the defacto standard across other industries, and that IBM offered it to employees for free on their workstations, so it was the logical choice to make. Couple that with the fact that SmartSuite was not nearly as developed as Symphony was a few years ago, people couldn't be hassled with converting between file formats, or sending files to other employees or clients and pray that the recipient could actually open it. SmartSuite was a boon on productivity and hence the broader use of Office within the company.

Now IBM is in the market for software. As was stated earlier, the best place to start promoting your own product is from within. In all honesty, a LOT of employees never used Symphony simply because no one knew it existed, and if they did, they did not have the time to learn it. Now that IBM has shifted away from Office for internal uses, our customers may see this and may want to investigate -- that's the theory at least.

The article is a bit misleading in that Symphony is an OO.o variant. Here's a hint: it's not in no more than a humvee is a variant of a boat. The real only similarity is that they both use open standards as their default file types. With that said, however, Symphony still supports MS Office formats and many people DO switch to using those formats as the default anyway. Having said that, there is not much of an uproar as one may think about this switch. Symphony supports both open standards and Office standards, which is the best of both worlds for us.

I guess the bottom line is that this was a BUSINESS decision and not one further the development of open standards. IBM is a business and the business will do what is in its own interest to stay in business. I'm sure it is saving us lots of money, and to be honest I thought this sort of change would be forced down years ago. Either way, it gets the word out on Symphony and gets us off office which saves money. It's the best of both worlds, no?

Re:A Bit Misleading

[binarylarry]

Actually, I'm pretty sure Symphony uses forked OpenOffice code directly. It's not just implementing the same formats, a lot of the tools are very OOo like.

While it may not have been an altruistic move for open standards, having such a large and visible software company switch is going to be an eye opener for other big and small shops. Plus IBM has been a terrific open source citizen for a while now, so this doesn't stray from their previous altruistic actions (open sourcing all kinds of stuff, eclipse, libs, etc).

Re:A Bit Misleading

[haruchai]

Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM. Having used MS Office, several OpenOffice.org variants, WordPerfect X* and IBM Lotus Symphony, all in various versions
but, typically only for intermediate use ( no really complex docs or fancy macros ), I have to say that Office 2003 would be my first pick if money isn't an issue.

Second, would be the Go variant of OO.o ( http://www.go-oo.org/ ) and Lotus Symphony would be WAAAY at the back.

It's slow at everything, and, for what i do, lacking in features. If money is an issue, then any variant of OO.o plus Gnumeric for really big spreadsheets,
(yes, Gnumeric really is that good and George Ou should have done his tests on it before clamoring that an open source app couldn't match Excel 2003)

Re:A Bit Misleading

[war4peace]

I'm thinking of this switch from another point of view. Although it's difficult to calculate exactly, each software switch comes with a cost, and by that I don't mean costs for pushing this to employees' machines, but productivity costs associated with getting used to a different Office Suite.
- All those guys who were creating nice PPT presentations for customers now need to do it in some other way;
- All those guys who used to create nice pie charts in Excel now need to use another app to make them;
etc., etc.
The above come with a price tag attached. And consider 2 weeks worth of accommodation (and I am wildly optimistic by saying that), that's 2 weeks of salaries paid to those people during which they are unproductive. It might indirectly cost IBM more than the bunch of licensing costs that they were trying to save. And even whether IBM is an IT company, it surely holds a large amount of not-so-technical employees who will have a hard time adapting to Lotus Symphony.
I would take a wild guess and say that in the end it's costing IBM more to make the switch than not to make it. But then again, maybe those extra learning costs have somehow been accounted for and they're seen as hidden productivity costs that will go away eventually.
(I wonder whether it's all just a pissing contest between large companies from a high management's point of view...)

Re:A Bit Misleading

[curmudgeous]

Another disclaimer...I WAS an IBM'r until fairly recently.

I truly hope they have updated Symphony. The version that I tried a few months back was based on Open Office, but was at least two generations behind (was a late 1.x or early 2.x core) and was total crap compared to OO 3.x. To add insult to injury, they had it integrated with the Notes 8 interface. Opening a spreadsheet or document would bring it up in Notes instead of a separate window. There were options to change that behavior, but based on how poorly the app ran to begin with I opted to change the file associations to just point to the newer OO. The combination of Notes + Symphony absolutely killed my four year old T42 laptop, even with 2 GB RAM installed. It took nearly a gig of RAM just to boot up in the morning, and the CPU would occasionally spike and hang at 100%, something that could be traced back directly to Notes + Symphony.

Re:A Bit Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnumeric: Fuck yes.

Re:A Bit Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

it is an OOo variant. Based on the 1.1.6 codebase which was the last release that was dual licensed SISL/LGPL. Newer ones are LGPL only and because they have coupled it too tightly with the expeditor framework they are finding it hard to take a fresh cut. The OpenOffice.org/Staroffice UNO api is what you use to talk to Symphony. If you look carefully I think you can still find soffice.exe burried deep in the maze of twisty passages that get installed with Notes/Symphony.

Re:A Bit Misleading

[cheesybagel]

I concur with your Gnumeric love.

I can explain that

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, I was joking mostly. I really don't know why I got modded insightful

Let me explain.

Practically everyone on Slashdot is a linux loving, MS hating, pro-GPL geek with no social life.

Now, everyone knows that the previous paragraph is not true. That stereotype applies to rather small portition of slashdotters. However, many here think that the other Slashdotters believe that stereotype to be accurate.

As such, they easily mod anyone posting against that (anti-GPL, "MS has done good stuff too", etc.) as insightful. By doing this they believe that they are helping others see that the stereotype doesn't really apply to everyone here.

Conversely, it is very easy to get funny mods by using that stereotype. If you claim that Slashdotters have no social life, you get modded either as troll or funny. The latter is not because mods think you actually are funny. It is because they think "Hah. That guy joked about our lack of social life though he really knows it's not that accurate. He is one of the people who get that! I'll give him a funny mod."

Think this post is not correct? I bet you that you could post practically identical posts to each and every Linux or MS related story about how MS products are occasionally rather useful and get modded insightful every single time.

-AC

Document formats...

[stagg]

I'm not sure what the consequences of this would be at the consumer level. The OP talks about breaking MS's monopoly on word suites, and the largest benefit of that would be moving away from .doc formatting. I think the largest concern I have about Microsoft's dominance of the market is that most people seem to assume that .doc is a standard format, and think that it supports any kind of interoperability. Of course it really doesn't and isn't. As far as I can tell however that's only an issue at the consumer level. Sure my friends, and my boss might send me .doc, but any kind professional publisher expects .rtf formats. Basically anything with any legitimacy at all will call for .rtf, which while still spawned by microsoft is at least a standard format that encourages interoperability. A much bigger win would be OpenOffice suites actually supporting .rtf formats properly, so that legitimate work could be done through them.

Re:Document formats...

[Arainach]

Err....what? Both .doc and .docx are fully documented formats. And ODF isn't any better - try opening a file created in OO.o in Abiword, resaving it, and opening it in OO.o Oh, look, all my formatting is broken! It's not interoperable by any stretch of the word.

Re:Document formats...

[Orion Blastar]

Well OO.o and IBM Lotus Symphony both open up MS-Office file formats, but Lotus Symphony also opens up Lotus Smartsuite file formats as well.

IBM feels that if they cannot break people of their DOC habits they should at least have an MS-Office alternative that opens up DOC files but also supports the ODF open document formats.

For example in the business and college worlds, most people want documents in the MS-Word format. Lotus Symphony can do that. Colleges have proof reading services that work in DOC format only, which are also plagiarism checkers.

A member of my learning team at Univ of Phoenix only had MS-Works with her PC, so I gave her a CD-R with OpenOffice.Org on it and told her to save it to Word format. When she did the team paper editing she saved it in OO.o format, which no team member could read. At the college I had OO.o installed on my laptop and I converted it to DOC format and gave copies to the team members and printed it out as well.

Some people may choose IBM Lotus Symphony as a second office suite just to handle the ODF and OO.O file formats as ODF is more selected and will be replacing PDF and DOC on Wiki sites and other open source web sites. Soon FOSS documentation will be in ODF format, and Wiki pages will be printed to ODF format that can be downloaded.

This is a Sun/IBM alliance with the ODF format to challenge the MS-Office formats, but they also use MS-Office formats as well, or there would be no point in using them if they didn't convert back and forth to the MS-Office formats.

The DOC format isn't open, isn't standard, isn't an ISO standard, but it is the most often used document format by a majority of computer users because Microsoft Windows dominates the market, and most Windows PCs had MS-Office preinstalled before MS-Office 2007 got preinstalled as trialware/shareware/demoware. Also Microsoft gave companies a bulk license for MS-Office in cutting them a discount for buying in bulk. But why bother now that IBM Lotus Symphony is free to download and use?

Re:Document formats...

[jimicus]

I think the largest concern I have about Microsoft's dominance of the market is that most people seem to assume that .doc is a standard format, and think that it supports any kind of interoperability. Of course it really doesn't and isn't.

Which is well and good, but 20 years or more of conditioning from Microsoft has trained a lot of people to believe any cross-version incompatibilities are natural and to be expected.

Personal experience suggests that this isn't far from the truth. Once you leave the realm of simple, well-understood formats that solve simple, well-understood problems, this is precisely what you get. (See also HTML and the various differences in rendering engines)

Re:Document formats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Both .doc and .docx are fully documented formats.

Snort.
That's a good one.
Documented in the sense that you get xml tags like 'showthislikeword97did' in docx and binary dumps of undocumented memory structures in .doc

Re:Document formats...

[IsaacD]

yeah, because MS would NEVER publish their formats. go back to your little, dark hole

Re:Document formats...

[Zearin]

(See also HTML and the various differences in rendering engines)

I think you mean CSS.

There are HTML rendering differences, but I think at this point they are trivial...

Excel

[Tarlus]

I can appreciate the drive to adopt open source.

However, the money I spent for Microsoft Excel has been worth every penny. There's just simply no comparison, and I find it amazing that all of IBM would be willing to abandon it completely, regardless of cost.

Re:Excel

[StuartHankins]

YMMV. I have Excel 2002 on my machine and I prefer OpenOffice. I mostly do simplistic charts/graphs and drop in 1K-20K row datasets for analysis though. Text-to-columns in OO works well for me.

OTOH, Excel likes to mangle leading zeros -- unless I'm very careful and also password-protect data, when I send out a spreadsheet for manual completion invariably I get a copy back that's had the leading zeros dropped. Otherwise so long as you turn off Clippy and customize it a bit, Excel is probably the best of the Microsoft Office software.

Oh, except for 2007. Training people on that has been a royal PIA. What were they thinking?

Re:Excel

[mgblst]

God damn I hate excel. Sure, it is very useful for a lot of thing, but it is so shit at so many. For starters, the genius programmers decided to clear the clipboard when you first load the program. Thanks for that (this is for 2003). Also, if you use text to columns once, it decides to enforce that whenever you paste from then on, which is a really fucked decision. Don't get me started on entering formulas problems, where it just goes crazy sometimes. If you have an @ in the formula, it ignores it. And it doesn't handle errors very well at all.

Re:Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is saying you can't use Excel within IBM. It's just that they are asking you to justify the cost of the license before they pony up. Result is that those with a genuine business case will still have it; those that don't will use the Symphony or OOo equivalent. Makes a lot of sense and saves money, which is how companies stay profitable.

Re:Excel

[rdebath]

Excel likes to mangle leading zeros.

Oh shit, tell me about it.

It ain't just leading zeros either just try typing, pasting or importing the codes "MARA01", "MARB02" and "MARC01"

Nice Story ... but not true.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing on IBM's internal homepage, nothing in my email, no notification from my management.

This coming week is "Open Client Awareness Week", with activities at more than 80 IBM sites. The idea is to show how far the Linux based clients for laptops and desktops have advanced. Even that is focused mostly on Linux, with no mention of Symphony that I can find.

Re:Nice Story ... but not true.

[metamatic]

Nothing on IBM's internal homepage, nothing in my email, no notification from my management.

Send me an e-mail and I'll point you at the intranet standards that say ODF is the preferred format.

Re:OpenOffice variant? Shades of the infobox

[bth]

A version of the infobox (a flexible properties panel that can stay open while you move around in the document) exists in the Mac version of Microsoft Office and in Apple's iWork suite.

I hope it's not anything like Notes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotus Notes is some of the shittiest software I have ever used. It makes that bloated hideous POS Outlook look good.

Not all of us

[Anonymous Coward]

I am at IBM and they have tried this before. We had Lotus Smartsuite and were forced to use that. Not only it was horrible but it definitely drove our productivity down. And whenever we sent files to outside world, no one could open it. We will end up creating a world friendly 'MS Office' files. Sometimes we got away by creating PDFs.

Again they are imposing Symphony on us. First it is dog slow. None of the other folks (i.e. partners in other companies) want to use it. So again we end up trying to save documents in 'MS office' formats. And it is a mess. Spend time correcting fonts etc because it is not equivalent. Above all, most of the features from MS Excel are missing.

So thanks, no thanks.

Available in Jaunty "partner" repository

[randallman]

I went to IBM's site, downloaded it and as I was trying to install it, dpkg (or frontend) told me a newer version was available in the repo. Sure enough:

~$ sudo aptitude install symphony
[sudo] password for (me):
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
    symphony
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 189MB of archives. After unpacking 455MB will be used.
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty/partner symphony 1.3-1jaunty1 [189MB]

Cool!

Re:Available in Jaunty "partner" repository

[randallman]

Installed it and played with it. The interface is NOTHING like OpenOffice. It's built on Eclipse so uses SWT and looks much nicer than OpenOffice (because it's mostly native widgets I think). Another large difference is that everything is contained in a single frame. New documents are opened in tabs within the frame. I couldn't find a way to break a tab out into its own window in the short time I tested it. I'm sure some people would prefer multiple windows.

It would be nice if this got some significant market share and helped to push open formats. Interesting.

It's not much of a point of view...

[zkiwi34]

As it's common knowledge that there was and is a lot of annoyance and extra work involved in going to the last office, so either you'd have to be very critical of Microsoft for laying that extra cost on their customers or you'd have to give IBM a pass on what you assume is a 2 week cost.

IBM rationale

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if anyone else has posted this info yet so I apologize if it's redundant.
With release 8 of Lotus Notes IBM migrated the Notes client to an Eclipse base. In an effort to provide an all inclusive product to SMBs they resurrected the Symphony name integrated OpenOffice functionality into the Eclipse based client. This has the effect of providing the end user with a consistent UI - a shocking development I know. Today a Lotus Notes user can access mail, docs, spreadsheets etc from within the same client via tabs like Firefox. It's pretty slick and a very welcome move into current day UI (always a poor area for IBM in the past). People at IBM have stated their intention to add functionality found in the old Symphony (1-2-3 etc)to OpenOffice where it makes sense. If IBM follows through it could be a huge bump to OO. As OpenOffice supports MS97 formats in addition to odf the transition should not be a big deal. Novell made a similar switch to OO over a year ago. The most significant effect will be on MS revenues, even if MS was giving Office to IBM for 10 bucks a seat - that's over 7 million lost to Stevie boy.

10 days?

[Anonymous Coward]

WE were given a lot more than 10 days. I've been using Symphony for at least six months, after a email came down telling us to switch over. I have not yet received any emails giving me just 10 days. Of course, I still have to keep MS Office installed because of the occasional PowerPoint presentation that makes its way to me.

Symphony doesn't seem widely used

[harlows_monkeys]

When OO 3 came out, it severely broke spreadsheets in Symphony. It wasn't until Symphony 1.3 came out, something like 9 months later, that Symphony gained the ability to handle spreadsheets from OO 3.

Yet if you Google for information on the problem, you'll find pretty much nothing. That one thing in the Lotus forum is the only mention I've found of it.

I conclude from the fact that such a major incompatibility could go virtually unnoticed by most of the OO and Symphony user communities for so long that either almost no one uses Symphony, or Symphony users are closed groups that don't need to exchange documents with outsiders who use OO.

Re:Symphony doesn't seem widely used

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at IBM and develop software that works with Office documents that are opened in Office apps. There was a problem with a fix I made that caused it to fail for documents opened in Symphony. I shipped that fix though I was asked "what about when a Symphony using customer complains?" to which I replied, "when that happens I'll hop on my flying pig to get a fix from the moon fairy". Almost no one uses Symphony internally and we certainly don't send documents to customers that are made in Symphony... but I don't care about internal users. None of our customers use it, and having used it myself, I don't expect they will ever want to.

Yes it went back to 1970s

[Ilgaz]

Please tell me how to use Lotus Symphony instead of ANY office suite or even a basic Word processor if it has this "known issue":

"Graphics with text cannot be copied to other applications

In the Lotus Symphony SpreadSheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations, inserting a graphic and inputting text into it, and then copying the graphic to another editor, or to Lotus Notes, the text inside the graphic may be lost."

Do you realize Apple Lisa (pre Mac) could do it? Or MS Office on Win 3.1? Or OS/2's great, wasted Office suite? (IBM Works)

Last time I checked, it didn't support OS X PowerPC , even a G5 which its official name is IBM 970XX. Does it support IBM POWERPC at least?

300k vs 1M

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my God (a.k.a OMG) this articles sumary says one whole third of a million!!!! Way to bump the number and make it sound like a whole more. I mean, dont get me wrong, 300k users is a lot. but one third of a million sounds bigger... you have got to love the well chosen words...

Install your own, what happens?

[Ilgaz]

Wondering what would happen if guy buys his own MS Office, iWork or installs Abiword? Of course, an "admin" would install it for him.

Not a MS office fan but it seems like a bad idea to make choices for employees. For example, lets say there is a huge bank mainframe contract and guy has to prepare his papers in 48 hours. Will he struggle with a totally new, unpolished "open" thing or finish the damn papers? It may cost IBM millions of dollars at the end, just a single mainframe sale especially in this economy and there is still FUD about mainframes.

Certainly not the first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ministry of Defence (Singapore) made the switch (http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/specialreports/0,39044853,39230757-4,00.htm) back in 2006 and now the entire defence sector is using it. That's a couple of magnitude as compared to IBM's switch.

Re:OpenOffice variant? Shades of the infobox

[ctmurray]

I love the Mac version of Word (which I use at home) compared to the work version on a PC. I love the infobox feature, that makes working so much easier. I am glad MS allows a separate development team for the Mac.

I used to work for IBM...

[herojig]

I used to work for IBM, but that was when we had to type .im to get a picture to print on the IBM 3820 printer using BookMaster. So I say use whatever is going to keep the stock price up and produce a better pension check. Keep up the good work boys...so far so good.

I know, I know....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I may be at the critical point in my life when I become disillusioned (or just tired) of some of the /. posters. Are we finally seeing the death throes of M$???!?!?!?!???? NO. We are not. Yes Microsoft charges for their software, but COME ON. The anti-microsoft slant is fine (as an opinion) but I'm quite tired of seeing it in every /. posts summary. If nerds can't be objective (as in not trying to influence the reader with a certain take) then who can?

lotus symphony is not open source

[openright]

lotus symphony is not open source.
And as the source is not available, there is no proof that it is a open office variant.
Somebody prove me wrong.
Yes, this is good for ODF, but symphony is not yet open source.

Not really the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at Microsoft and even though I was not working with MSOffice, I still followed the market. Every two years or so, IBM would come out with "an order" for everyone inside of IBM to use something else than MSOffice, so claiming this is something new is kind of ludicrous. I imagine that even IBM are having trouble weening their organization off of MSOffice.

Shouldn't that be

[Anonymous Coward]

\begin{cough}
\LaTeX
\end{cough}

ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

VI FOREVER!!

Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to say it, but MS is the lesser evil of the two these days. I just cannot stand IBM.

All of the above

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux/Mac users are also happy. Maybe there are Solaris users around even"

Don't forget those lucky enough to use a workstation-class AIX box! But yes, all of those exist here.

As an anonymous insider here let me say I welcome this. I use one of the several linux variants (semi-officially) supported for use as a main workstation within IBM and this is good to hear. Whilst I'm no huge fan of symphony, the mandate for ODF allows me to use OO.o as a first class citizen without worrying how my .doc is going to render in someone else's MS Word instance. From now it is they who are wrong! HAHAHA!

LyX can be easy to use.

[spaceturtle]

LyX could loosely be called a LaTeX editor and can be sanely called simple and/or easy to use.

Can OO-Base replace MS-Access?

[walterbyrd]

My understanding is that oo-writer, and oo-calc, are pretty good applications, and they can replace ms-word, and ms-excel, for most users.

But, oo-base is another story. As I understand it, oo-base is very slow, and about ten years behind ms-access in features.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:Can OO-Base replace MS-Access?

[cheesybagel]

The MS Access database engine is such a POS you could easily get something better. Especially from IBM the guys who invented SQL in the first place!

What MS Access does have is a nice graphical interface for building database apps. So it is that which needs to be done and is quite a decent amount of work.

OS2 Too

[Halotron1]

Funny, but they had a similar position with OS/2.

Back in '95? I interviewed with them and they said they were using NT4, but still trying to sell OS/2.

This will slow you down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for IBM and have installed this on my laptop, mainly because its a mandatory download. Its another great example of IBM taking something that works, and making it unworkable. If you try and use it, it will virtually stop your PC from working for about 10 seconds, while it starts, then, while it is running, you can barely do anything else but work in the app. I still use OpenOffice instead of this IBM "offering". They have truly mess it up.

No only that

[ClosedSource]

He should be teaching them how to use a generic keyboard layout.

Re:OpenOffice variant? Shades of the infobox

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop telling we complainers that there's something better available which meets our desires! You smug, self-righteous Apple fanbois make me sick with all your infoboxes, features, and awesomeness.

Wait a min. - IBM wanted Government to dogfood OO?

[morganew]

IBM has been spending millions of dollars lobbying for governments to mandate the use of Open Office, and yet they couldn't internally dogfood their own products? Sorry, but that's just too funny.

Maybe they thought those government types were going to turn in good bug reports so they wouldn't have to!

More interesting question...

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point soon, IBM's going to have to choose whether to move the standard desktop to Windows 7 (ie committing huge revenues to Microsoft over the next N years). I guess that will only happen if it thinks that its internal Linux client isn't mature enough.

Inaccurate reportb

[brajbir]

The post is a little inaccurate. 1/3rd HAVE NOT been asked to use lotus symphony. Old timers, who joined the company before have the license to use M$ office. However, anyone who joins new will not be able to use m$, and will have to use OO or Symphony. Also, this is nothing new. As far as I know, this has been going on for some time in IBM (about a year???)

Jorge

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they can claim to have over 300,000 people using Lotus Simphony, because I don't see the need of a lotus clone of the good Open Office