Tuesday, September 18, 2007

IBM supports openoffice

IBM announced that they are going to support OpenOffice and launch it as Lotus Symphony.
IBM will also put 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort.
Kudos for all this.
With IBM's backing OpenOffice will certainly be benefited and we might see OO emerge as an worthy competitor.
However, I have one slight doubt.
Why is IBM launching it as Lotus Symphony ?
Why not simply support it as OO ?
Why is this re-branding necessary ?

OpenOffice is now a very familiar open source application. Almost all desktop Linux know about it. Even some of Windows users use it and like it. Now one fine day when IBM introduces Lotus Symphony; will that not result in confusion in peoples mind ?
Users like me will see that same product ( at least more or less the same product) is being offered in two flavors
1) OpenOffice
2) Lotus Symphony.
Which one to choose and why ?

Will Lotus Symphony be having more features than vanila OO ?
If no, then why not just stick to OO ?

IBM has with this OO initiative tried to further promote its Lotus brand.
If IBM really wants to help OO, then it should simply help OO with its talented developers, provide commercial support and promote OO as such.
This in my opinion would be truly helping OO.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Why is IBM launching it as Lotus Symphony ?"

Same thoughts here. But remember, its open source, the OOo people cant take what they want, just as IBM. Its better that OOo gets somthing they mean is needed, rather then getting more stuff there. And competition is always good imoh.

Looking forward to see the results of this, and one thing for sure; crappy ms don't like it:-)

Abhay said...

Yeah,
Competition is always good.

Anonymous said...

IBM may have woke up to see that the competition is no more against the bigboy alone but also the fast growing up pal, OO. Since no one can assure OO will remain open source, it is better to have Lotus Symphony and others around...

Keep up the good work boys! OO will grow up to face the bigboy. From where I see, it is almost there in most aspects. What needed is wider usage. That could mean lesser demand for expensive office suite.

I had downloaded and run Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets yesterday, I somehow feel a little more familiar with Lotus than OO Calc... it must be the old Lotus 123 calling.:)

Anonymous said...

Any chance that Lotus Symphony might just have a import option for WordPro Files? Feeling that WordPro was being abandoned, I switched to OOo and spent over 3 days converting over 3,000 WordPro documents into OOo. Slow, tedious work but finally finished. I like OOo but miss that comfortable feel of tabs, indexing,macros,etc. Been with Lotus since AmiPro and would love to see OOo work with WordPro docs.

Isaac Lopez said...

Loved reaading this thank you

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