Woowar

Category microsoft openoffice symphony
I just received an email from the UK magazine ComputerWeekly with the results of a recent survey conducted by them amongst UK businesses to look at trends in desktop software.

Of course, it's just a survey, and the one thing you can guarantee about a survey is that it's wrong (it's simply a question of how wrong) ... but nevertheless it does make interesting reading. Specifically ...

• Although 93% of businesses use some sort of Microsoft Office version as their main desktop productivity software at the moment, only 66% believe that Microsoft Office 2010 will be their next rollout.
• The remaining businesses - one in every three - expect to see OpenOffice (13%), Google Apps (3%) or 'Other' (17%) as their next step.
• That represents a 30% fall-off rate for existing Microsoft customers - an extraordinary change if it comes true
• The 17% who think that their next move won't be Microsoft Office, nor Google Apps, nor OpenOffice, are interesting. What are they thinking? Perhaps it just shows that there is a serious amount of appetite in the marketplace for something 'other' than Microsoft's over-priced and over-complicated Office tools, but that nothing has - yet - risen to fully meet people's unvoiced (and probably largely un-thought-through) expectations. Somehow I doubt they're all scrabbling to roll out Lotus Symphony, although doubtless that is becoming a worthy runner.

The survey also showed that only 48% of companies have any plans whatsoever to roll out Windows 2010, with over 50% saying that they have "no plans". Whether that means they won't, or simply that the couldn't answer the question properly because they haven't yet decided when, is a question worth answering. But, once again, it seems to demonstrate a cooling of attitude towards Microsoft's product direction (and possibly pricing model).

Some 45% of businesses who don't already use open-source software said that they would definitely be using it in future, albeit mostly only for 'some functions'. Again, the "uncle Bill knows best" approach that dominated throughout the 1990s and early 2000s seems to be dissipating. This can only be a good thing, for business, for competition, and for innovation.

The survey summary can be seen in PDF form here.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:18 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category openoffice ibm lotus symphony
... and I was right.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's well-deserved and widely-publicised failure to get OOXML ratified as a standard, IBM announced that they were publicly backing the ODF formats.

Now today, on the day of the Lotus Collaboration Summit Launch Event in New York, they have announced that the Lotus document editors bundled in Notes 8 are being released as a standalone product called Symphony. See the New York Times article for their version of the story.

For me, one of the most pleasing aspects of this story, other than the obvious benefit of bringing more competition into a market that has been a stagnant monopoly for too long, is the URL of the Symphony site: http://symphony.lotus.com

Yes, you saw it here first: not an 'IBM' to be seen in that URL. In fact, navigate to www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony, and you get redirected to http://symphony.lotus.com. Yes - the IBM site redirects TO the lotus.com domain. When was the last time that happened?! Times really are a-changing inside big old blue ....

Posted by Julian Woodward At 11:24 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category ooxml odf openoffice lotusnotes notes8
This story has been around in the blogosphere since yesterday, but the reporting of it on NetworkWorld.com caught my eye.

Link: "IBM piles on Microsoft's open document defeat" Two things stand out from the story. Firstly (bolding mine):

IBM also said it will switch to the main OpenOffice.org code base for the text- and other editing applications embedded in Notes 8. Those changes will come with the next maintenance release of the software, which shipped last month. Notes 8 editors now use a derivative of the OpenOffice.org code that IBM developed internally.

That aspect of it somehow escaped my attention in the flurry of blog posts, and is fantastic news.

The other jump-out from the story is:

Another example can be seen in Capgemini’s announcement that it will offer IT support around Google Apps.

This is also big news, as it starts to bring web-based productivity apps into the mainstream. So suddenly there's a new question to ask. (Okay, it's not really a new question, but it's needs asking again) ....

IBM is clearly seeking to break the dominance of MS Office using the built-in editors in the Lotus Notes 8 client, that much is obvious, ambitious, highly laudable and definitely A Good Thing. But is IBM fighting the right war? Critics of Notes have been saying since 1995 or before that Lotus Notes is "yesterday's technology". But, at least for a part of the market, the day seems to be coming closer when user will live in an online world, where their "productivity applications" are all online Google Apps style tools, email is GoogleMail, and Lotus Notes really IS yesterday's technology. So would Exchange be, by the way, and that's exactly the point.

The big corporates will never go this route until they are able to host the apps themselves, and it's a natural and inevitable step for Google to license their platforms in this way before too long. But the smaller organisations that make up about 90% of the business market may start looking at this seriously. And why would a 1-man-band business care? His data is probably safer on Google Apps than it is on a not-backed-up PC in the spare bedroom anyway, and most people are not ignorant of the risks they're taking without a coherent backup approach - they just don't have the energy/knowledge/rigour to mitigate that properly - so if Google Apps will effectively take care of that for them (at least for a subset of the data) then the online nature of the apps becomes on balance a bonus not a curse.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:01 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)