IBM Plays Symphony Again after 20 Years - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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September 18, 2007
IBM Plays Symphony Again after 20 Years

IBM has resurrected the old Lotus brand Symphony to launch its Sun OpenOffice-based open source office suite. Although termed an office suite and hyping collaboration on its own web site, neither Symphony nor OpenOffice has an email component the way Microsoft Office comes with the Outlook email client or the way DEC All-in-One and Data General CEO and all the real original albeit proprietary office suites worked (which is why Ozzie wrote Lotus Notes, right?). It's an interesting choice of brandname since the original was chosen by John Dvorak in 2004 as one of the 10 "worst software disasters" in industry history. Symphony also includes some of same tools that are inside Lotus Notes 8, which can be used to extend a business process or to create dynamic composite applications. The product supports Microsoft and Adobe formats as well as the Sun OpenOffice format.

So unlike when IBM entered the open source software (OSS) application server market with its purchase of Gluecode in 2005, IBM is not competing with itself with this OSS move. You can use any email client and server and IBM hopes you will chose Lotus Notes and Domino. Of course, the documents will not appear in the email client in an integrated fashion the way Word is usually used as the text editor within Outlook. This appears to be an effort by IBM to bolster its OSS bona fides, particularly related to the Sun OpenOffice Open Document Format (ODF) format. In fact, you can now call it IBM/Sun Open Office because IBM (according to press reports) said that it will contribute 35 developers to the Sun OpenOffice project.

And this move by IBM illustrates how important applications are to the eventual success of OSS. Despite all the fits of pique in the OSS community over Linux vs. Windows, the thing that matters to real people is how they read their email, type their personal and business correspondence, pay their bills at home, plan their production lines at work, and so forth. Real people could care less if there is Linux in their Tivo or Symbian in their cell phone or Windows in the cash register at the corner convenience store.