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Subscribe via EmailThe H blog reports that IBM is switching wholesale from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - most of us knew that IBM was heading in this direction, but it is good to see it confirmed in such emphatic fashion:
American IT giant IBM plans to have its staff abandon Microsoft office software. According to a report in German daily Handelsblatt, the some 360,000 employees of the firm are to switch from the MS Office Suite to IBM's own Lotus Symphony. The paper's report (German link), is based on leaked internal IBM correspondence from upper management. IBM's internal move away from Micrsoft Office began in June 2008 with early pilots. By the end of the year, IBM documents are to be created in the ODF format, which is license-free for everyone.Now that's a great show of support for their own product and technologies!
Microsoft Office will then only be installed at IBM with prior approval. The instructions from the end of August stipulate that Symphony has to be installed on all company computers within ten workdays. 330,000 employees have reportedly already switched. The goal is apparently not to save money. Rather, IBM wants to make sure that all information will remain available on all IT platforms and on the internet.
IBM apparently plans to use only open formats, but not necessarily open source; Lotus Symphony is based on the old version 1.x of OpenOffice and supports Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations. Although the OpenOffice code was open source, the license at the time allowed companies not to release their changes; IBM made use of this and Symphony source code changes have not been open sourced, although Lotus Symphony is free of charge, requiring only user registration. IBM developers have changed the office suite in some crucial areas too. For instance, IBM's office suite has its own interface, and three programs have been left out: Drawing, Formula, and Database. The most recent version was Lotus Symphony 1.3 which was released in June.
Comments
This makes practical and religious sense.
Practical because everyone inside IBM will be compatible.
Religious because it means that a certain amount of compatibility with the outside world will be lost. In particular when working with business partners, suppliers and customers, it would be impossible to collaborate effectively using the familiar 'track changes'. Yes, Symphony provides versioning and, of course, you can collaborate using a wiki.
But, please correct me if I'm wrong, unless these inter-company dependencies can be addressed, isn't a wholesale move to Symphony cutting the IBM nose to spite its face?
Thanks for your comment, David. However, I would argue that IBM is not 'cutting its nose to spite its face'. All organisations should be looking to collaborate with other entities using open standards, not proprietary technologies.
Microsoft has been the dominant, closed, secretive productivity standard for too long, with continual format changes ensuring that organisations are *forced* to upgrade simply to be able to read the latest format documents sent by their partners. I lose count of the number of .docx docs I receive each week which until recently have been useless to anyone but the few organisations that have upgraded to Office2007.
If I wish to collaborate with my partners, I wouldn't expect them to be forced to use my choice of applications, formats and technologies - instead we should be looking for common ground, common standards and truly collaborative technologies (not email attachments for sure - even if they are in ODF format!).
In an ideal world, I would agree with you. In the real world of today, co-existence is the best we can hope for. Microsoft Office is the dominant (by far) application suite and we all have to live with that fact at the moment, even if we're planning transition at the first practical opportunity.
As far as I'm concerned, had Symphony offered true compatibility and track changes, I'd have not bothered buying Office 2007 earlier this year. It doesn't and I have to work with other people. You can argue with some validity that I'm over a Microsoft-created barrel. But pragmatism gets the better of idealism when it comes to earning a living.
Regarding docx - these can be read by earlier versions of Office (Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003) usinga compatibility pack plug-in. Converters and viewers abound - from Microsoft, from other publishers and as online services.
I don't think you and I are so different in our dreams but we inhabit slightly different worlds in reality.