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 symphony
On the latest Feb-08 episode of Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, co-host Leo Laporte has picked Lotus Symphony as his 'Software of the Week' (at about 62 minutes):

"It's cool-looking ... really attractive ... take OpenOffice and turn it into something beautiful ... pretty impressive"

Subjects covered in this episode include the dreaded red ring of death on the XBox360, the Vista SP1 release chaos I blogged about earlier, the MicroHoo news, the hosts' take on why Vista sales may actually be better than they appear (not sure I entirely agree with their logic), and the best anti-virus software for Vista.

This bit - at about 38 minutes - is spot on ...

"Microsoft clearly needs new blood ... they are so busy protecting these [dominant positions in] markets, that they don't understand that the future is passing them by ... Microsoft has become IBM: slow-moving, and really protectionist of their past successes. This is a company that is going to make billions and billions of dollars every year for the foreseeable future, but if they don't get moving on this [cloud computing] stuff, they're going to become less and less relevant."

If you don't already listen to Windows Weekly, and you have a spare hour per week, it's well worthwhile (particularly this episode). It's kind of the Windows equivalent of the Taking Notes podcast, but nowhere near as witty or entertaining

Back to Lotus Symphony: I would love to see what happens to the Symphony download stats in the next week or so as people catch up with this episode...

Posted by Julian Woodward At 8:09 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category lock-in lotusnotes lotusphere microsoft symphony
In the Lotus Strategy session just now, Microsoft Office was referred to as "legacy". In many ways true, but I think it will be a while before the wider market (non-Lotus customers) wake up to this way of thinking.

It does seem, though, that for a significant minority of people who are sufficiently switched on to question assumptions, Microsoft is becoming as irrelevant now as IBM became in the 80s. The collective wisdom of the stock market seems to back that up too: over the mid term the Microsoft share price has pretty much flatlined.

Of course, the decline of the incumbent monopoly doesn't automatically mean that Lotus will benefit, but with the pace and depth of advancement in the Lotus product family over the last couple of years, Lotus is as well placed as anybody to pick up a decent chunk of market share.

The next few years are going to be interesting.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 4:14 PM Location Lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category lotus symphony open source lotus symphony
As you may have seen, IBM recently announced the availability of Lotus Symphony beta 2.

The top coverage was all about the 250,000 downloads so far, and the "up to 50%" performance improvements. But buried in the typically thrillingly laid-out IBM press release is this gem:

Due to the strong market response, IBM is doubling its global resources devoted to Symphony, increasing the Symphony development team to more than 70 software programmers.

That's a lot of people. Beta 2 was available 8 weeks after beta 1, on November 13th. From then until the Lotusphere opening general session is exactly 10 weeks. I wonder what we'll see then ...

Posted by Julian Woodward At 12:16 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)