Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Lotus Symphony

I was a little surprised that the IBM Lotus Symphony was based on Openoffice.org. Whatever happened to the old Lotus Office suite? When I went to download the application suite, I found their are Linux and Windows binaries, but no OS X. The download for Windows was about 112 MB or so.

Its a pretty standard office suite, though the interface kind of reminded me of the eclipse IDE.

Update: Its funny, but I just ran into Joel Spolsky's article about the old and new Lotus Symphony:

IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli.

Update 2: Ok, so Joel is talking about a version way older than what I was thinking of. I was thinking of Lotus Smartsuite. Why didn't they open source Smartsuite? I guess its way easier to adopt Openoffice.org code base after Sun has done all the hardwork around license issues and such!

Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...