OPEN Thought
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Whenever I write a report that praises a product, I always try and use it myself to see if it is all that the spokesperson says it is.
Some products are strictly for the data centre and not for home use. In the past I have suggested to IBM's P-Series division that I might be able test out a Power system (on which I planned to run Linux for the Power Macs) at home and I told Brocade that I would like to try installing a a storage array at home to compare to my current, verging on 2TB, file-sharing jungle.
But both requests were met with quizzical faces by their spokespeople or press relations officers, probably wondering about my sanity or lack thereof. But there are many things, especially free software, that can be used very well at home.
For the past month or so, I have been writing most of my work using IBM's Lotus Symphony. If you are of a certain age, the name Symphony cannot fail to bring a smile to one's face. It was the name of Lotus' 1983 office suite that added a rudimentary word processor to a very 1-2-3 like spreadsheet. The Symphony of 2008 might not be able to open .WRK or .WR1 files as it is based around Open Office and Eclipse and it is aimed at saving IT budgets from half of the "Microsoft Tax" (Windows and Office) to free up money for service offerings, an area that IBM dominates.
This sounds good to the IT manager and to the reporter, but how does it work in practice?
Symphony 1.0 was a resource hog. Running on a decent, last generation 1.8GHz socket 754 AMD Sempron with 2GB of memory (my bedroom fileserver), one could see the text come up first and the menus slowly appear to the right. Obviously the Eclipse user interface (UI) bits run in different threads than the OOo (OpenOffice.org) word processor bits. Nor would it install at all on my 500MHz AMD Geode notebook, which was more than happy to run Star Office and Open Office.
IBM may be trying to save people from the Microsoft Tax, but if first impressions on yesteryear's hardware are anything to go by, it will instead enrich chip and memory makers as it needs up-to-date PCs to run. To their credit, Version 1.1 which recently came out is noticeably faster and seems to be less memory intensive, but still not as fast as OOo 2.4 on the same hardware.
The UI, with enough screen space, is a refreshingly different from Open Office and, say Office XP (the last MS Office I have used). It probably feels a bit more like the Eclipse IDE (which it is based on) or maybe Photoshop than a word processor in that respect? Different and a bit mouse-intensive, but it does grow on you after a few weeks. However, while it is fine on a 1600x1050 desktop screen, the UI quickly becomes annoyingly inefficient on a 1024x600 notebook display, using far too much desktop real estate for its tabs and menus.
All in all, it is clear where IBM focused its development efforts - at the modern corporate desktop.
Once down to writing, it is pretty much the same as OOo or any other word processor. That said, I could probably get away with using notepad or vi for my writing. However, the killer detail that has driven me up the wall is the inability to switch between windows easily. It's either a mouse click on another tab or control+F8 to bring up a list of windows, both of which are disruptive to the chain of thought when turning a rough draft in one window into a finished news article in the other. Alt-Tab to change between windows is much quicker. Even Eclipse has a one-step way to switch between different editors (Control+Pageup / Pagedown), but that was not carried over. Judging by forum posts, it is a major complaint Symphony users are having. Hopefully IBM will have re-implemented Control+Pageup / Pagedown in the next version.
As a word processor it is slower and only almost as good as OOo. That said, as an office suite, the developers told me that it had a best in industry compatibility with Microsoft Office for its presentations, which a lot of office workers do use, so perhaps it would make more sense for the general office worker rather than the wordsmith. This seems to be echoed in the development of plug-ins with lots of database plug-ins available to allow the spreadsheet to tap into corporate databases and IBM's own Websphere and Quickr.
The primary reason I am persevering with it is the romanticism associated with using a piece of software with roots going back to 1983. That stance either makes perfect sense or no sense at all.
The other reason is even more ephemeral. It was at Lotusphere Phuket that I found myself having dinner with some of the Lotus developers and we drifted to talk about politics (as everyone does at the dinner table) and how modern society has failed to give to humanity where it mattered.
It was now up to the large corporations (such as IBM) to drive humanity's innovation and to give to society what mattered for free, be it world class operating systems such as Linux or Symphony.
My new friend was trying to explain to me how it was this drive to empower mankind and make humanity better and stronger that was driving a lot of the developers who were working on Symphony. Being part of IBM-Lotus gave them the chance to make a difference in a way that is no longer possible in today's modern, capitalist, global society.
"It sounds like we are no longer talking about technology, but about meta- physics. Soul 2.0?" I suggested.
Soul 2.0 is where modern artisans (software developers) devote their lives to create works of art as a statement to humanity's strength. Only, where the artisans of old had kings and princes as their patrons, today's artisans work not for king or country, but for the inter- national corporation that transcends such ancient thinking.
The pharaohs of Egypt used their power to create huge pyramids that told the world how powerful they were. With soul 2.0, IBM is trying to do the same, using open source building blocks instead of huge stones. Whether this is the fancy of one man or the collective will of IBM-Lotus will remain to be seen in future versions of Symphony.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Next
