Udo's Techblog

IBM just released a new office suite. Well, to be fair, it is not exactly new - since it's essentially another OpenOffice distribution, but what the heck, this time it's coming from IBM. It's called Lotus Symphony, also not new, since they just rehashed a name from their successful Lotus lineup of days past. And when I say successful, they mean: it totally tanked at the time but we kinda hope nobody remembers and since we still got the trademarks we hope nobody notices how cheap this whole stunt was anyway.

Of course, I gotta try this out. Yep all over the country, people are totally tired of, say, being invited to expensive shows like Demo 07 and having to sit through these awful software presentations while being paid premium by their employers. Oh, the pain! But me, I like to see this stuff. You know hand-coded little applications from the little guy, like IBM. Cool apps, coded with love, probably in a garage or a basement somewhere. Just some lonely geek on a budget, maing a difference, because the world still cares about grassroots innovation. Oops, well, my mistake. But whatever. OpenOffice - IBM Edition, here we go! Oh, and it's based on OpenOffice 1 for some reason, well...

Upfront, I totally know what to expect. IBM is a Java company, OpenOffice is written in Java, and the whole thing is held together by a C++ kernel... yes, that means up and foremost long long periods of waiting as the user stares intently at the screen while their 50 GHz 30-core CPU struggles for minutes to resize some document window.

Downloading Symphony is a pain in the ass, since it involves that everyone opens an IBM site account first before any file can be obtained. And when I say "opening a site account", I'm not just talking about an email address and a password. No, it's IBM, it's an annoying multistep process where you have to give everything away, because you know, all the fields are mandatory and filling it out incorrectly is probably a DMCA violation or something. Well, after you registered the site kind of tricks you into opening a Java downloader applet that will just freeze Firefox forever. But there is also an option to use that old-fashioned plain HTTP downloading facility that your browser still supports for some silly reason. But you know, it's IBM we're talking about here, small-time guys sitting in a basement somewhere, barely able to pay their bandwidth bills, so don't expect download rates higher than 30 kb/sec while waiting for that 130 MB whopper to trickle down.

With the exception of maybe Novell and the whole open source community, IBM is one of the few companies who would deem it appropriate to ship an "installer" executable that, once started, opens a console window and does nothing else but barf a "deploy" folder and the real "setup.exe" onto your desktop, then quits. If I hadn't known this was a Java project, the fetish-like usage of "deploy" would have given it away. Turns out running the installer itself actually is relatively painless (but do I really need to be shown each of the miles-long package names that are going to fill up my hard drive?)

Oh heck, the installer just changed the OS file associations away from OpenOffice to Symphony without asking me, what a bummer. After installation, everything is all ready to start!



I was somewhat blown away by the user interface! It's nice, it's clean, it's blue! Sadly, this customization goes only so far and IBM is not exactly showing love for details. Just some examples:

• the huge "Open" button on the top left creates new documents, it doesn't open anything


• only a fraction of the useful tool windows actually integrates into the sidebar


• styles are a supressed feature, sadly no one will find it, much less use it


• braindead menu options, like File > Open then opens into a third level that has only one option: "File"!


• should tool windows really take up to 10 secs to load on a Dual Core CPU with 1,5 GB RAM?


• when you scroll, the entire document view gets redrawn, every time!

So the verdict stands: it's not catastrophic, but for a rehash of a 3 year old OpenOffice branch, a new UI skin with no real depth is not enough reason to switch. There is only one question left: why? Why did they do this?

One final word of warning: you can't uninstall Symphony, cause the uninstaller exits with "Error 2738.Could not access VBScript run time for custom action ." before doing anything else.