Its new! Its the future! Its Lotus Symphony!!!

Ha ha ha. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. The brains trust at IBM have decided that the way to fight the Office behemoth is to jump 20 years into the past and revive Symphony.

Actually, only the name is being dug up from the grave. The old name is being stuck onto an old version of OpenOffice. Oh, and they have somehow managed to make this bastardised version chew up a whole gigabyte of RAM (as opposed to 128 megabyte for OpenOffice - WTF?!?). The beastmaster must be quivering in his boots.

But, "its free", say IBM. Well "free" somehow becomes less appealing to me when I have to shell out for RAM upgrades on my entire PC fleet, or I have to frig around recoding all my Office macros that will not work anymore, or I can't open any password protected Office files, or if I have to shut all my other apps just to get this furball to load. That's pretty expensive for "free".

Ok, partial credit for running with ODF for the file format, but...

The killer is that since IBM is not offering 100% fidelity with Office doc conversions, I have to manually check each and every document that moves between Office and ODF formats to check for crapulent conversion errors. I know there's nothing better for my workers to do, so no problem right? From this non-functionality alone, the product fails. Its not getting into my enterprise, and I bet it won't get into yours, until fidelity reaches 99.9% or better.

Are you listening, IBM? If you are going to launch a product with the "enterprise-grade" label, get the product to an enterprise-usable state that is acceptable for actual enterprises. Duh!

Am I being a bit harsh? Post a comment and let me know. But, until I see a roadmap from IBM that gets this frankenstein creation up to scratch I will remain suspicious. Actually, given IBM's track record at hitting release dates, I don't want a roadmap - I will not be happy until I see real code that really works.