I came across this presentation from LCTY Hong Kong this morning, “Going beyond office with Lotus Symphony” delivered by Dr Michael Karasick and Gavin Tay, which articulates why Lotus Symphony has the potential to be so much more than just another productivity suite:
One particular slide caught my eye:
I hadn’t really been aware of the “innovation chasm” in office productivity products between 1989 and 1998, but I think they’re right – very few new office products were released in that time-frame. Of those that have been developed this century, it is only really Google Docs and OpenOffice that offer anything substantially different for their cloud infrastructure and Open Source foundations respectively.
So Lotus Symphony is ideally placed to bring something new to the party – a free enterprise-quality productivity suite with an integrated collaborative development environment allowing truly innovative productivity applications. Check out the presentation above to see some of the areas where IBM are investing to make this vision a reality.