IBM Policy Switches From MS Office To OO.o 331
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."
OOoh (Score:2, Funny)
About fucking time! (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Insightful)
If a 10-day change is "slow as molasses" then I'd like to see what happens when they react quickly to something!
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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.
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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! (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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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! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wait. What? (Score:2, Informative)
". . . past their acquisition of Sun . . ."
I think someone's been misreading recent headlines.
Ooo's (Score:5, Funny)
Peter: Oh my God, Brian, there's a message in my alphabets... it says Ooooo!
Brian: Peter those are Cheerios.
Sound Clip [entertonement.com]
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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.
In my dreams (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
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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 approac
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[cough] LaTeX [cough]
Shouldn't that be (Score:3, Funny)
\begin{cough}
\LaTeX
\end{cough}
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] 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.
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[...] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 m
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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'
Re:In my dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
WordPro? (Score:2)
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.
Instant feedback (Score:2)
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Heh, some things never change... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Your department actually bought licenses for all of the software that it used? ;)
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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 b
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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 compa
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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 what
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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).
Every Product Requires Support (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Implications (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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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! [ibm.com]
Facts wrong again (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
There is a LOT that uses MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [microsoft.com]
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.
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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 h
OP making up his own story (Score:2)
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?
Cunning... (Score:3, Funny)
...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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [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)
Document formats... (Score:4, Informative)
Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
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:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? Shades of the infobox (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Bob reborn? (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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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"
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Because it is. IIRC, they basically ported OpenOffice to the Eclipse platform.
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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? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 th
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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 chal
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"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,
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I don't much care what they call it, as long as it isn't made by MS. Sweet story!!
Re:OpenOffice variant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
According to the summary Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.
... Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) ...
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Informative)
It actually uses Eclipse for the GUI and OpenOffice for opening/saving/formatting/displaying documents
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
It uses 200+ megs of RAM just after starting. Take that, Firefox!
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On the other hand, Firefox is fine in my 512MB Desktop. Figure that out
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Symphony vs OO (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which may not be a bad thing if IBM has to patch things and send those patches upstream.
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Very true. Forcing a company to eat their own food could certainly benefit all of us who use it.
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And software isn't worse just because it's free.
Re:Just another feabile attempt (Score:4, Insightful)
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Rockoon wrote:
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
Re:Now is not the time to celebrate (Score:4, Interesting)
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 :(