I thought today might be interesting...
... 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 ....
