More on Symphony

I just posted a few more thoughts on IBM Lotus Symphony over at Collaboration Loop:

See: IBM Lotus Symphony - The iPod of Collaboration?  In the post I argue that IBM hopes to create a "halo" effect by giving away Symphony, hoping that once people use it, they will be more open to looking at the rest of IBM's UC&C suite.

My earlier post on this blog was picked up by IBM's Ed Brill on his blog.  In the comments on his site several folks wondered why I would argue that Symphony represents an inflection point when people can already use OpenOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Office.  The response I posted on Ed's blog is that in our research we've seen reluctance among most enterprises we've interviewed to rely on open source collaboration and communication applications, primarily because of lack of enterprise-class support/management/maintenance options.  Having IBM behind Symphony changes the game by bringing enterprise support options to a package of free software.

Now, we just have to wait on Symphony for Mac (currently there are only downloads available for Windows and Linux).

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Comments

[Craig Mische]

It sure would be nice if us Mac users didn't always have to wait. Patience is not a forte of mine.