It's arguably the prettiest alternative to Microsoft Office, with a clean interface in a soothing IBM blue. Oddly, the once-biggest name in computing christened it "Lotus Symphony," after a spectacular and expensive failure that dates back to the days of DOS. But this new IBM Lotus Symphony seems poised for success. It is the latest open source freebie, with version 1.0 released at the end of May. It includes a word processing module, a spreadsheet, and a presentation graphics package. Its underlying coding draws on OpenOffice, with a radically different user interface by IBM.
July 10th 2008