IBM plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft's dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said the programs promote an open-source document format. The company is announcing the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site.
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Member since:2006-05-11
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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I've downloaded the Windows version and have spent about 20 minutes looking at it. IBM have added a new interface that includes a tab for each document. The appearance is fresh in a blue Office 2003 sort of way and it seems to work fairly well. The OpenOffice underpinnings show up if you scratch the surface.