hmph? why would ibm spend millions developing a suite and then provide it for free, when open office, star office is available and when most people already use ms office as well?

perhaps the software may have a time-out, although this inconvenience is not disclosed in simple english within it's eula.

like hostage-ware, the user will one day find that all of his/her documents are no longer accessiable without a paid subscription or upgrade of the so-called freeware.

sounds like the methodology used by the drug dealer in the back alley.

I just have a question for the moderators here. What magic event causes the change of direction in the displayed comments? I am unsure of this, although I will say I haven't spent much time on it - it seems strange to see comments early in the day scrolling one way, and come back to refresh my memory, or look at something else and see the scroll in the opposite direction.

This is the best free office suite ever created. Blazing fast compared to OpenOffice.org (which was already pretty fast anyways) and never, ever crashes. Much easier to use than OpenOffice.org.

This release is not worthy of the Lotus name. What a shame what IBM has done. Some of the best software minds were at Lotus in the pre-IBM era. The new Symphony is no SmartSuite.

Roj, you obviously don't understand the history of software. True, Notes has grown large but it is not an email system. Notes has an included email client in the system, but Notes itself is server/client/dev environment. If you think of it as email, then you are missing 95% of what Notes has to offer. I could go on about how many innovations came through Notes and how many of the technologies are now mirrored in WWW standards. I could say the same thing about OS/2. I'm no fan of IBM in general, but OS/2 was the best desktop OS of its day. How could you argue otherwise?

Well, I've spent 2 years developing on OS/2 (from Warp to Aurora). And it is obviously not my favourite OS of choice even from the user standpoint. Remember booting from floppies when you need to install fix pack (yeah, there was a hack to avoid that, but sometimes it was not working). Remember PM freezes (when OS and all background applications were still working, but it was not reacting on mouse/kbd)? I would rather start using Win95 again, than OS/2

Easy:

Applications.

Ease of use.

Ease of configuration.

Software and hardware Vendor support.

People went with an alternative that had all of those.

OS/Who had none of them.

The better technical solution is often NOT the best solution.

End of discussion.

Remember the single-threaded input queue?

Coming form an OS vnedor whose specialty was supposedly mainframe OSs, that was inexcusable.

Mind you, MVS went very fast in a straight line with one app. load it down with multiple apps and MULTICS ate it alive and spat out the bones.

OS/Who wasn't much different.

The better technical solution is often NOT the best solution.

That depends entirely on the situation.

In many cases, OS/2 was the *only* solution. :)

(At least, if one didn't want to have to mess around with constant updates, reboots, and admin/maintenance reminiscent of the current Windows offerings...hopefully 2008 will cut out a lot of that)

I guess you never went to a bank in the 90s, and early 2000s.

OS/2 ran almost all of them.

'nuff said

Banks were owned by IBM. The Blue Suits were masters of FUD and used the talent well. Unfortunately for them, the couldn't convince desktop users to move to an obviously inferior user experience. OS/Who stayed in background in kiosk devices until the next round of replacements and then was phased out for Windows-based solutions. In a kiosk environment, a single threaded input queue wasn't an issue. That certainly isn't the case in a multi-application user environment but then again, IBM never has understood the end-user environment.

At the end of the day, OS/Who died because of that.

History has proved this in spades.

Also, I reiterate: you missed the point. The better technical solution is often NOT the best solution.

Not for end users.

Obviously.

And those comprised the vast majority of the mass consumer market.

As just one example, one organization I worked for had Lotus Notes servers and SMYP MTAs running OS/Who until NT matured enough at version 4. At that point, the glitchy OS/2 solutions were rapidly ditched in favor of a much more stable and smoother running NT solution. Cases where it was the ONLY solution rapidly became extremely difficult to find as the Windows juggernaut gained speed - and that was on the back end. The front end battle was long since a rout.

Hands down, OS/2 was the best solution at the time.

Running business critical applications has NOTHING to do with "user experience". It has to do with not losing money.

OS/2 provided memory protection, and many other methods of keeping applications stable and available.

IBM didn't understand the end user experience because that wasn't their business. Their business was to build business grade platforms.

The best technical solution IS the best solution, the prettiest, easiest one to write that letter to mom on isn't.

Thanks.

International Business Machines

Hmm, yep I can see how they are in the consumer business.

Anyone that claims NT4 was smooth, or was more stable than OS/2 is an idiot.

Windows didn't begin to mature into an enterprise grade product until 2000 SP4.

'nuff said.

1) I wouldn't touch a Lotus app with your hand. Notes? DumbSuire? 'nuff said.

2) Java? Riiiiight. Slow, bloated, prone to heap issues - a misbegotten mess of a programming language.

3) IBM software? An oxymoron. Remember OS/Who?

Another low rent loser...

3) IBM software? An oxymoron. Remember OS/Who?

*coughs*

Sorry, coffee all over the keyboard again. OS/2 was by far one of the most rock solid OSes of it's time. We finally took our last one down all of three years ago. Had almost forgotten about it since it rarely needed updates and damn near never needed a reboot.

Not even Linux is that reliable.

PC_Tool++

"Symphony itself is not a Java application". That's a wrong statement. Symphony = Eclipse (Java) + OpenOffice. They wrapped in Java open office and they used their Eclipse Java framework for gluing everything together.
As is it might not be very impressive, but being based on the eclipse platform, it will enable to build many enterprise applications that use open office.

Mmm... that name "Lotus Symphony" isn't deja vu?

It was only the name of a $20 jumble of applications that masqueraded as a $499 office suite in the mid-1980s. Well, actually, I'm sure that they spent more than $20 converting 1-2-3 into a word processor by itself but that's about all the whole thing was worth.

At least, this Symphony is better since it's based on OpenOffice 1.x.

Yeah - and that one fell on its a** too.

I tried the last beta and it was a laughable crashfest. Alas, Smartsuite.