Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Remember Lotus SmartSuite?
Did you know that you can still buy a copy of Lotus SmartSuite from IBM? SmartSuite is a decent product. It runs on various flavors of Windows including XP and can share files with all versions of Microsoft Office. It's also inexpensive. So why doesn't IBM give it more attention? SmartSuite applications support LotusScript (like Notes), use a lot of the same UI conventions as Notes, etc.
I used to work at IBM but I have no real knowledge about why SmartSuite was deprecated. What's wrong with it? As far as I can tell, the main problem is that it's not Microsoft Office. IBM backs OpenOffice instead. OpenOffice is, effectively, an open source clone of Microsoft Office. That's fine albeit not particularly innovative. Other vendors including Sun support OpenOffice as well. How do vendors make money from an offering based on OpenOffice when customers can just download it for free? And how do products based on OpenOffice such as Sun's Java Desktop and IBM Workplace compete against each other? Any improvements that they make to the code must be contributed back to OpenOffice.org which will also benefit their competitors..
I used to work at IBM but I have no real knowledge about why SmartSuite was deprecated. What's wrong with it? As far as I can tell, the main problem is that it's not Microsoft Office. IBM backs OpenOffice instead. OpenOffice is, effectively, an open source clone of Microsoft Office. That's fine albeit not particularly innovative. Other vendors including Sun support OpenOffice as well. How do vendors make money from an offering based on OpenOffice when customers can just download it for free? And how do products based on OpenOffice such as Sun's Java Desktop and IBM Workplace compete against each other? Any improvements that they make to the code must be contributed back to OpenOffice.org which will also benefit their competitors..
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