Early Alert: New FREE Productivity Suite
IBM this week has unveiled a new productivity suite aimed as a replacement for Microsoft Office — and it’s free. Lotus Symphony offers three major components: Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets, directly challenging Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The software is currently undergoing beta testing — and bugs are being reported — but it will certainly go public fairly soon.
For writers who already own Microsoft Office, this new contender will likely be of little interest. In fact, it appears to be more a challenger to OpenOffice and the emerging online suites such as Zoho and ThinkFree than to Microsoft’s dominate office suite. However, younger writers on a tight budget may find Lotus Symphony to be their productivity suite of choice.
Fellow old-timers may be confused by IBM’s choice of title for this software. Lotus, back in the 90’s, had another suite called Symphony, but apparently the new IBM offering is not a legacy software, but a full-fledged new contender. I myself also remember Lotus Smart Suite, which I actually used for quite some time until I bit the bullet and paid the full fee for Office.
For a full review of the new software, take a look at CNET’s review. CNET reviews are, in my view, among the most authoritative, and this one is as good as ever. Do be cautioned, however, that the review headline is misleading, suggesting this software runs only on the Linux operating system. It runs also on Windows XP and Vista.
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Tom Colvin 
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