IBM mulls free desktop software for small laptops
By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 17:45:00 08/16/2008
Filed Under: Technology (general), Hardware, Software
MANILA, Philippines -- IBM is redesigning Lotus Symphony to make it suitable for small Internet-centric laptops, a top Lotus executive told INQUIRER.net.
Lotus Symphony (or Symphony), first announced by IBM late last year, is a free downloadable suite of Lotus-branded programs such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, similar to Microsoft Office.
The current version, however, is still too "memory-intensive" to mobile Internet devices, said Edward Orange, director for Lotus at IBM Asia Pacific.
"As promised when Symphony was launched, we will be coming out with updates every two months," Orange said in an interview during a recent visit to Manila.
A number of laptop vendors have come out with several models of these small laptops -- also referred to as mobile Internet devices (or MIDs). Locally, sales of these devices have been brisk, most notably the EePC by Taiwanese vendor Asus.
Earlier this year, Intel announced it will come out with a microprocessor, called Atom, designed specifically for this notebook category. Several vendors recently launched Atom-based laptops, including a new version of the eePC.
IBM, meanwhile, is looking to make Symphony an alternative to Windows, although Orange acknowledged the current version is still designed for enterprise users.
"But this is just the start of the open platform we have envisioned," he said, hinting it is highly possible that Symphony can be tied into these mobile devices.
Symphony, he added, is not just meant for business users but can suit other segments as well such as education. In China alone, he said there have been around 260 million downloads of Lotus Symphony, according to IBM.
During the 1990s, IBM released its OS/2 operating system for desktop computing, which, like Windows, came with its own set of productivity software competing with Microsoft Office.
Symphony is based on the open-source software developed by the OpenOffice.org consortium, the same code from which StarOffice was derived by Sun Microsystems.
Symphony also uses the OpenDocument Format, also supported by Sun and Web giant Google, and competes with Microsoft's Open Office XML.
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