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81 Comments
- Aethra, on 06/19/2009, -2/+29Open Office with a face lift.
- inactive, on 06/18/2009, -2/+29IBM giving away something for free? Must be a catch but this looks pretty cool!
- Landragoran, on 06/19/2009, -1/+23uh, Symphony's been around for a while.
i prefer OpenOffice. - p51d007, on 06/19/2009, -2/+23Just curious why you think MS Office "should" be free? They are a company. They sell a product. They expect to make a profit on their product.
Why is it that everyone thinks everything should be "free". Costs money to develop a product. No one is "forcing" anyone to use office. Granted, MS does have a stranglehold on the competition, but, there are good alternatives to MS Office. - hadak, on 06/19/2009, -2/+15How many clicks does it take to download lotus symphony? Let's find out. One, two, ......ten....fifteen...aw, ***** it.
- Midtowner, on 06/19/2009, -8/+20I tried it some time ago. I ended up sticking with Office. I don't really care about the price. People pay me lots of money to output professional looking documents. For what I do, Office is mostly the best choice, WordPerfect, however, does have some use as its macros suite and envelope creator are the best in the business. My experiences with OpenOffice and Lotus, both of which I tried, seem like they'd be good for some things, but when you have to have documents formatted 'just so,' Word and Wordperfect just can't be beat.
- albator, on 06/19/2009, -3/+13Symphony is based on openoffice.
- berational, on 06/19/2009, -6/+15That's a facelift from open office? Looks pretty 1999 to me. Even the video and product names are 1999. Why would someone use this over open office?
- fragMasterFlash, on 06/19/2009, -2/+11I spent too many years dealing with the craptastic POS that is Lotus Notes to ever use any Lotus branded software ever again.
- JoeJim, on 06/19/2009, -1/+9So, I actually created an IBM account, and fifteen clicks later . . . my request is being "reviewed" to ensure that it is in compliance with "strict U.S. export restrictions." Thanks, IBM, for squandering my once-yearly fit of corporate optimism.
- inactive, on 06/19/2009, -0/+8Only to find out you need an IBM account. "***** it" is right
- SarcasticPirate, on 06/19/2009, -1/+8Decide for yourself.
OpenOffice:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f ...
Lotus Symphony:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Lotu ... - darkNiGHTS, on 06/19/2009, -1/+8Google Docs does everything I need it to, most casual word processing users don't use 90% of the features that MS office has.
- aznhomig, on 06/19/2009, -7/+14Looks even worse than Open Office.
- ledzep19752000, on 06/19/2009, -0/+7Symphony looks better!
- counterplex, on 06/19/2009, -0/+6IBM's given away lots of things for free. Eclipse [http://www.eclipse.org], for one, is an amazing IDE that is highly popular and totally free. Other tools in the Java world include jikes [http://jikes.sourceforge.net] (a very interesting Java compiler with great error messages), IBM's version of the JVM (possibly only pre-Java 1.3) and all the tutorials and papers on ibm.com.
- marx2k, on 06/19/2009, -0/+6It's like Coca Cola buying space in high schools to put up soda machines and get mentioned in textbooks. Get them tied in early.
- jeffgtr, on 06/19/2009, -4/+9I don't understand why so many people fork over the $$ for office. Seems to me with Google apps, Open Office and now Symphony wordprocessing and spreadsheet software are becoming like water and air.
- TrevorPace, on 06/19/2009, -3/+8As an avid linux user I'd love to say that I use OpenOffice, but for me it just doesn't compare to Office 2007, it's mainly the UI that bugs me. They just need to give it a decent facelift and make it easier to use.
(It's funny that a linux guy would care about the UI so much) - whodathunk, on 06/19/2009, -0/+5That's bad financial decision making. Did you buy a $1000 coffee cup for on the shelf when you remodeled your kitchen, because that kitchen cost $50K to remodel anyway and it 'only' made the kitchen $51K, or was the $20 coffee cup more than adequate?
My employer gives me the $1000 and I use it to have an extra vacation.
And I like it like that. - LastDitchHero, on 06/19/2009, -0/+4Have you used Lotus Symphony vs Open Office? The only reason this gets used vs Open Office is the IBM logo. Nobody ever got fired for buying a Microsoft or a IBM product (well just a saying but for the most part true).
I wish they would have just re baged OOo with IBM and threw in some templates, fonts, macro documentation, and some add ons. - ptFoe, on 06/19/2009, -0/+4why does the menu font look so awful in the screenshot
- booyahbitch, on 06/19/2009, -2/+6This smacks of Lotus Smart Suite...it was free...for a reason!
- LilRabbitFooFoo, on 06/19/2009, -3/+6People still use Lotus for anything? I thought that overpriced corporate junkware died in the 1980's...
- warragul, on 06/19/2009, -0/+3Don't bother following the Symphony for OSX link. It doesn't work.
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/ ...
Well done, IBM. Put the resource in place and then link to it, not the other way around. - inactive, on 06/19/2009, -3/+6I prefer Abi Word to Open Office, due to it's ease of use, lack of bloat and being lighter on resources, but this looks interesting, too.
Anything that challenges that bloated, overpriced, cluttered heap of ***** known as MS Office is a good thing. - Filter, on 06/19/2009, -0/+3Symphony is a rebranded OpenOffice.org with Eclipse added to it. Last time I checked they were a little behind and didn't have the latest features available in OpenOffice.org. I will check this again just out of curiosity. Overall Syphony isn't that bad.
- mrfunktastic, on 06/19/2009, -0/+3Came here to say this. Notes is like the Winchester Mystery House of bad UI.
http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/ - Amazetbm, on 06/19/2009, -1/+4I'll stick with OpenOffice.
- themisanthrope, on 06/19/2009, -0/+3Last I knew, Abi Word was a word processor, period. Not really comparing apples to apples here.
- paul_c, on 06/19/2009, -0/+3A long while (the name, at least). Early to mid-80's I believe.
- inactive, on 06/19/2009, -1/+4water wont be free for much longer
- gemlarin, on 06/19/2009, -0/+2Been using NeoOffice for free for quite some time. Free competition is always welcome :)
- RedBear, on 06/19/2009, -0/+2I'll stick with my hammer and chisel...*****..just broke another monitor. :(
- YoWhatDaFuxUp, on 06/19/2009, -1/+3I'll stick with my type writer
- srg13, on 06/19/2009, -0/+2My Uni has some kind of thing like that too where you can get free Microsoft products, but that has no impact on submission - for assignments I've had to submit electronically, PDF was the only accepted format (which is great in my opinion - I use LaTeX on Linux, so it means I don't have to convert it into a crappy proprietary format)
- cyssero, on 06/19/2009, -1/+3They both look terrible.
- erkokite, on 06/19/2009, -4/+6I'll stick with office. I had OO for a while and it wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't very good. Symphony is based on OO, and the UI looks horrible. Office 2007 seems to run faster for me under windows on virtualbox than OO runs natively on my Kubuntu install. I haven't compared it to Office 2007 under Wine, but I assume it is slower. Plus I really like they way hotkeys work under the ribbon interface. IBM is going to need to step it up if they want to compete with Office.
- harlowsmonkeys, on 06/19/2009, -1/+3I see little reason the choose Symphony over OpenOffice. And I think it is safe to say most people looking for a free office suite agree. Consider this: if you save a spreadsheet in OpenOffice 3, and try to open it in Symphony 1.2, it will not work. OO 3 uses the ODF 1.2 namespace, which Symphony 1.3 does not recognize, so all your formulas come out borked. This is fixed in 1.3, which was released a few days ago.
OpenOffice 3 came out about 8 months ago, and was widely adopted. This means that for 8 months, spreadsheet interchange from OpenOffice to Symphony was broken.
Yet if you Google for information on this problem, you will find very little on it. In fact, you may find nothing. If you search in the Symphony support pages, you can find one bug report about it, about three months after OO3 came out, with an acknowledgement of the problem from IBM and a promise to fix it in 1.3.
If Symphony were widely used, I'd expect such a major problem as not being able to read OO3 spreadsheets to have been widely noticed and written about. A Google search should find hundreds of mentions of it. The fact that it is so obscure shows, it seems to me, that very few people are using Symphony, and/or those who are using it tend to be isolated groups that are not receiving documents from outside. - Queue29, on 06/19/2009, -0/+2I'll stick with my notepad
- MrRtd, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Office 2007 is not worth the price for the average home user. On the other hand for some business it is worth the price.
I'm not anti-MS, I just think they over-charge for their products. I happen to really like Office 2007. - Midtowner, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be using InDesign to draft pleadings, memoranda, letters and such.
Buried for making an incorrect assumption. - MrRtd, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1You don't need an IBM account to download it. It just asks you to enter your name and email to be able to download.
- Avalontor, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Too bad Google docs can't help you spellcheck..
- tnvwboy, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Why is everyone building suites to start with? Why not work on building a GREAT Word competitor or a GREAT Excel competitor? Some offices use the whole suite, but a lot of people just need one or two of the products and don't use them together. I think the Suite mentality is producing mediocre components in the attempt to have a integrated suite.
- srg13, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1I'll agree it doesn't look great, but it does look a lot better than that screenshot normally - as most people don't use a dodgy monospaced font as their system font...
- gemlarin, on 06/20/2009, -0/+1I have used OppenOffice naively, and found it to be considerably more buggy than NeoOffice. Yes I know NeoOffice is built off of OpenOffice, but it still has serious issues on Mac. For example, lines that disappear when scrolling, and intermittent lockups. I have not had these issues in NeoOffice.
- sodade, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Show me a better excel and I'd ditch MS like a hot potato.
- Amazetbm, on 06/20/2009, -0/+1I'll stick with heiroglyphics.
- ocean17, on 06/19/2009, -0/+1Gahh, just tried it on Ubuntu.
First I had to run it twice - only to get a terminal window asking me to press '1' to accept the agreement. Second, this made-for-6 year-olds screen pops up (incorrectly sized) to let me choose document, presentation or spreadsheet. Third, the sum of all retrograde Lotus fonts & UI designs greets me after about a minute. It's worse than the little screen-shot.
Finally, I typed! Not a document though - instead 'sudo apt-get purge symphony'.
Ooo, all is forgiven! -
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