Making open source software successful on the desktop is pivotal for its advance in corporate use, and that will require drastic measures. But handing over to the open source community some snippets of hot Notes code such as a calendaring applet does not spell the death knell for Notes. No one blames the company for protecting a valuable revenue stream. IBM is squandering a rare opportunity to steal market share from Microsoft Office. One IBM strategist told me today that there are no plans to open source the company's "premier" Notes product and no plans to release a Symphony Notes or calendaring component in the forseeable future. Neither Lotus SmartSuite nor IBM's Workplace components ever made a dent in Microsoft's Office monopoly, and Symphony will likely follow the same path without a collaboration component. Let's face it: Lotus Notes is the crown jewel in IBM's software productivity portfolio. IBM Lotus Symphony is more like a resurrected Workplace-like add-on for IBM's proprietary Lotus Notes 8 and Domino upgrades (also announced today) than a genuine effort to pit OpenOffice against Microsoft Office. On the other hand, the company's release of free downloadable word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules in beta form today with no complementary open source collaboration component stomps out any of that excitement. On the one hand, Big Blue's recent endorsement and support and services plan for OpenOffice - an acknowledgement of the obsolescence of SmartSuite and Workplace - offers new hope for the struggling open source desktop.
IBM's debut of its homegrown open source version of OpenOffice without e-mail or collaboration features is not surprising but nevertheless disappointing.
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