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Friday, September 28, 2007 IBM's Symphony for the Office WorkerContinued from page 1 By John Borland
Selecting and manipulating text in IBM's Presentations can be noticeably clunky, and the ability to animate the text is far more limited than in PowerPoint. Symphony's spreadsheet tool is similarly basic. While offering virtually all the calculating and analytical power of Excel, its spartan interface offers few guides for novices. Experienced Excel users should have no trouble quickly picking up and using the program's advanced features, but newcomers to spreadsheet creation will find Microsoft's offering a far easier learning tool. A few bugs and glitches may be fixed in upcoming test versions, which IBM says it plans every six to eight weeks. The program crashed several times over the course of a few days' tests. Symphony programs can also take a frustratingly long time to load. They have a heavy memory footprint--in the case of a text document, about the same as Microsoft Word, a program not known for its slenderness. Responses across the board can occasionally be slow or jerky. Two specific omissions in particular caught my eye. As a writer, I found the lack of a thesaurus baffling. The 1.0 version of Symphony shouldn't be missing this under any circumstances. A grammar check could also be helpful. Less critical, I missed OpenOffice's ability to set Microsoft Office formats as the default when saving documents. IBM wants to push people toward the Open Document Format (ODF)--but in the real world, most people still use Microsoft formats, and this default feature saves time. These and other issues have already been identified by IBM's user community, which may turn out to be one of the suite's strongest features. The company has promised that its community site will soon have a voting feature, allowing users to choose which problems will be addressed first by IBM. Another interesting feature to watch will be the suite's plug-in architecture, based on IBM's open-source Eclipse application-development technology. For now, there's little available, but it does allow third-party programmers to create Symphony add-ons. Tools like Firefox and WordPress have been vastly extended by outside developers. IBM says that its main goal with the release of Lotus Symphony is to make ODF (which it helped develop) a true industry standard, replacing today's almost universal reliance on Microsoft's proprietary formats. "We're throwing our weight in here," says Mike Rodin, general manager of IBM's Lotus Software. "The IBM endorsement of [ODF] is already getting customers more confident in moving forward with [a Microsoft alternative]." Maybe so, but the company has a long way to go. The free suite will likely appeal more to cost-conscious small businesses and individual users than to corporations with large investments in Microsoft tools. The vast majority of ordinary software users will ultimately care more about ease of use and compatibility than about which formats are being employed. But IBM has made a good start, with more than 100,000 registered users in the first week. If it delivers on its commitment to actively develop the tools, fix bugs, add features, and listen to users, Symphony could become an Office alternative with real legs. |
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Comments
boustrephon on 09/28/2007 at 2:40 AM
5
weee on 09/28/2007 at 3:11 AM
31
nostromo29 on 09/28/2007 at 7:30 AM
1
Main reason is that there is no such thing as "Microsoft Office format". There is the format used for .doc and .xls files today. Which is different from the format used for .doc and .xls files a few years ago! If you have a program that claims to save in Microsoft Word format, Microsoft can break it anytime they want, just by releasing a new version of Microsoft Word with a changed format.
It would be pretty dumb of IBM to give their main competitor the power to make them look bad anytime the competitor wanted to.
If you ever want to have control over your own documents, the time to start refusing to deal with Microsoft formats is today. Yes, people will accept .pdf files, etc if asked politely.
bspatial on 09/28/2007 at 9:09 AM
1
brunascle on 09/28/2007 at 11:35 AM
Web Developer
70
and the ISO standardization process is not going well for MS. it was rejected for fast track approval, and it's also come to light that MS bought Sweden's vote. (later Sweden's vote was declared invalid.)
plus, MS can still pull the rug out from under OOXML and make the next version closed and incompatible, and we're back to square one.
OOXML in itself is not that bad a format. the problem is in giving Microsoft the job of making competing applications compatible with their own, when it doesnt make business sense for them to do so.
gabrielg01 on 10/01/2007 at 10:02 PM
294
IBM dumped its laptop business, claiming that laptops are becoming commoditized. True. But then they keep developing the mundane office software business. Just what the world needs...another office suit. Maybe IBM should buy back their typewriter business too.
It used to be that IBM was a bleeding edge innovator, far out there leading the way.
What happened?
fixerdave on 10/04/2007 at 12:28 AM
5
IBM appears to be jockeying for position when Microsoft loses the desktop. Maybe this whole Lotus bit is nothing more than an attempt to speed Microsoft's demise, an attempt to shoot the competition's cash-cow.
Think about it. What would happen if IBM put it's world-class heft behind a MS Office competitor? A product that provides real version stability, unlike the often-hyped but never delivered "compatibility" of Microsoft. And, then, they just gave it away for free. I guess we're going to find out.
Anyway, the Brotherhood Against Microsoft (BAM!) welcomes a new ally to the fight. Long live opensource :)
shobhit.shri on 10/05/2007 at 1:23 AM
2
It's just that they can't beat microsoft by fair means through lotus so they resorted to dumping.
rlounsbu on 10/12/2007 at 11:20 AM
2