OSNews

"These companies do extensive research on markets before they even consider competing head-on with Microsoft. Is their research telling them Microsoft's dominance in the office suite market has reached the apex and is now heading for the nadir? What's going on here?"

Open Standards...and well not such open standards.

"The ECMA standards effort was also supported by Apple, Novell, Intel, Toshiba, NextPage, BP, Statoil, Essilor, Barclays Capital, the British Library and the US Library of Congress. Some of these are also working to provide some level of OOXML compatibility in software products, as is Corel."

Everyone knows why Novell is on there, but check out Coral/Apple's history...and look for big injections of cash, and what they got in return.

Not to mention Microsoft's own Works is going freeware.

Looks like the office suite business is now a race to the bottom...

WE are not talking about freeware here, we are talking about "openness".

Sure, you will soon be able to download MS Works for free, but your files are still in a proprietary format, what good is that to me ?

You might have a religious requirement attached to the software you use, but for most people, "free" is "free." Works is going to compete, which is why I brought it up.

Almafeta, this has absolutely nothing to do with religion and everything to do with being able to read and edit my documents ten years down the line.

If you don't have anything else to contribute but flamebait, consider not posting at all, why don't you?

MS Works will be free and the format will be their OpenXML which is an open format. Microsoft already said that they were integrating that format into works. Happy day.

I am hoping to respond and chastise you nicely so that other's won't jump on you like a pack of hyenas. Read the other OSNews articles/links on MS's methods of operation with regards to ISO and read about some of the technology used with (Un)OpenXML and evaluate whether it is legitimately worthy of being considered an open standard. If you can't decide if it is or not, then please get head checked as soon as possible. ;-) Just because the name includes the word "open", as described by the company itself no less, means nothing. If my name included the word "God", would that therefore mean that unquestionably I must in fact be the God?

Edited 2007-09-19 16:54

have a look here....

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39288914,00.htm

pay attention to this part:


At the heart of the controversy are fears that Open XML is not as open as it claims to be, raising the possibility that customers using the word-processing format could become reliant on Microsoft for access to their own documents.

No thanks Microsoft, try again.

I'll be happy to test it as soon as they release a version for Linux. In the mean time I go for something cross platform.

I was wondering the exact same thing while reading the website. My take is that, since the software is really new, someone made a mistake with that info. No way I'll spend all my system resources just for a Write/Calc spin-off.

If those are the real specs, well, congratulations IBM, you (somehow) managed to write heavier code than Sun and the community togheter! And congratulations for a product no one will use

Now, someone please tell me that it's not true...

Hey, OpenOffice was already a memory hog, but so is the Eclipse platform, and this Lotus Symphony is based on BOTH at the same time. Yes, it's based on the Eclipse RCP.
It lacks some Gecko engine inside, throw Firefox on the pack and it will be the best of the worst.

Well, if they're in real trouble from that, heaven forbid that the devils start attacking!

SmartSuite was killed a few years ago.

>Lotus already have Smartsuite, what they are going to do with it ??

Smartsuite have been in maintenance mode only, for many years. And finally put out of its misery when IBM aquired Lotus. To bad - I used it for many years on the OS/2 platform and before that AmiPro as a single application. One of the things I miss the most on OO.O is the capability to have documents in tabs. Especially having one master document made out of severel subdocuments, each one in its own tab. It makes a hell of s difference, when working on long documents.

If IBM had opened Smartsuite, before Sun opened Staroffice and adopted the same strategy to develop XML document formats we would have Opensuite now providing the ISO document standard.

I always wanted AmiPro as my word processor back 15 to 20 years ago but I never ended up with it. Instead over the past twenty five years I have got through; Locoscript, Wordstar 1512, Easywriter, Mindreader, Chemwriter, Wordperfect, MS Word, Abiword, Kword and Staroffice/Openoffice.

I really feel the need for a tabbed WP interface. At work I have just finished preparing my section of a collaborative technical document, to be used for an internal strategy meeting, on Word (with large chunks of it done at home on OOo). A tabbed interface would have made it a lot easier. Anyway OO Writer 2.2 running on Ubuntu now seems a lot smoother and faster than Word 2002 on XP compared back to the days of OOo 1.x when it appeared clunky in comparison to Word.

SmartSuite is no longer with us, its having tea with Lotus 123 and wordperfect in the great software bin in the sky...

"What can this do that OpenOffice.org can't? "

It's probably closer to the level of Lotus SmartSuite than is OO.o. Probably has better integration with Dominoes, Notes, and whatever.

This move smacks of product dumping for the sole purpose of undercutting competition, which is illegal last I heard.

Edited 2007-09-18 21:08

"This move smacks of product dumping for the sole purpose of undercutting competition, which is illegal last I heard. "

When Microsoft abuse there Monopolistic Market and control of the OS by bundeling the OS with programs and making the *impossible* to remove. Its added value.

When IBM *offers* a suite of free programs its called product dumping.

Although the funny thing is they do seem to be investing an awful lot of time and money with developers; and lobbying for ODF; and making all there programs work together.

You would think they were like serious, and like it said in that little GNU manifesto all those years ago...make money from a service, and lets face it IBM are seriously into providing services its one of their main moneymakers.

No, dumping is when you pour product into a foreign market at a greatly reduced price, usually a loss, in order to undercut the competition. Much like Microsoft did with Windows and Office in the Chinese market to help stave off the government-influenced demand for linux.

"""

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I think you are being a bit over-cynical, there , Molly. ;-)

Actually, dumping is good for "We, the People". It's only bad if the intent is to destroy the competition and then abuse the monopoly they gain from that. That hardly seems a danger in this situation.

I doubt Sun will complain. I know OpenOffice.org will not. Ditto Koffce and Google. Corel might have something to say. Microsoft is hardly in a position to complain as they dump Windows and Office together as a bundle in China for... what is it? 7 dollars?

Edited 2007-09-19 03:08

Undercutting the competition is not illegal and what IBM is doing is probably not price dumping.
It's a bit fuzzy what actually constitutes price dumping but since IBM is not differentiating the pricing between regions (it's free everywhere, afaik) I'll go with that it's not price dumping.

RTFA, they are opening up Lotus!

Unless I'm reading a different article, no they did not...

They should have opened up SmartSuite 8 years ago, but I doubt they ever will now.

OK schoate09 I still read " I.B.M. is taking a different approach this time. Its offerings are versions of open-source software developed in a consortium called OpenOffice.org. "


It says nothing about offering Lotus. It only says that IBM will CALL it Lotus symphony (note the phony part)

>Why not open OS/2 or Lotus Smart Suite?

That would be great - that also will never happen.

The OS/2 and eComStation communities have tried for years and years.

Edited 2007-09-19 02:18

I actually haven't lost faith in Lotus. It was a fantastic brand for an office suite - Organizer was an awesome product in both look, feel and functionality.

I honestly hope they bring it back just for the sheer nostalgia of it.

As for the rest of Symphony, if it's OO.o under the hood, I have no doubt it'll be a nice tie-in to Notes. Most of the work has already been done and it still needs improvement. It's only logical that IBM shows support for it in both fronts.

Yes, I played with it for about 10 minutes and then uninstalled it. Obviously not enough to draw any real conclusions, but here are the highlights:

*It is disgustingly slow to load. I have a regular Celeron M laptop with 1 GB of RAM and Windows XP SP2 which is by no means a powerhouse, but an office suite should never take 40+ seconds to load. It started at least two processes when I opened a blank Lotus text document: one which I forgot the name of that used about 65 MB of memory, and a soffice process that used about 20 MB. In turn, OpenOffice 2.3.0, while no speed demon, launches in maybe 15 seconds on the same machine, and between the soffice.bin and soffice.exe processes uses a total of about 47 MB of memory.

*It looks quite slick. Very nice blue color scheme with orange highlights. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all open in tabs in the same main interface. There is an interesting formatting bar at the right side that changes based on context. Ribbon bar ripoff maybe?

*It does not have anything equivalent to Base or Draw, as far as I can tell.

*The installer changed all my document file associations without asking. Very irritating.

*As previously mentioned, OpenOffice traces show up everywhere you look.

No, because Microsoft would have to have evidence to show that once market dominance gained, they jack up the price; given that OpenOffice.org will be for ever and ever free both free of charge and in source code, Microsoft could never make such an accusation.

In terms of international trade, the local sales have to be higher than the exported price; for example, it is a well known practice by Japenese companies to use their local market as 'guinea pigs' then price their products lower overseas hoping that volume and market share growth offset the reduction in profit margins.