ChannelWeb names Lotus Symphony among 2008 Products of the Year

December 8 2008

Great news for Lotus Symphony!

ChannelWeb says that Lotus Symphony is the winner for 2008 Product of the Year in the "Desktop Application" category.  They write:
Lotus Symphony acts much like Microsoft Office, which is good if you are looking for something to replace Office at a fraction of the cost (free!). It's not so good if you are looking for something entirely different from Office, but there aren't many free suites that accomplish that yet.  ....

The Office 2007 installation here at the Test Center by default saves documents in the Office 97-2003 format (in the interest of backward-compatibility) so there were no problems editing files created in Symphony under Office 2007, or vice versa. The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless.
Great to see the recognition of the work the Symphony team has put in during 2008 to ship three releases (1.0, 1.1, 1.2), translate to 28 languages, and support millions of downloads during the year.  Congratulations to the team! 		Image:ChannelWeb names Lotus Symphony among 2008 Products of the Year


Link: ChannelWeb: The Best Products of 2008 >

Ed Brill Phoenix, AZ USA Category:  Lotus Symphony  Add/View Comments [11]

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  1. 1  Bruce Elgort http://elguji.com/Ideajamtour | 12/8/2008 8:18:47 PM

    WOW.....for a new product this is truly phenomenal. Kudos to the Lotus Symphony team.

  1. 2  Neil Wainwright http://www.nexonia.com | 12/9/2008 5:55:56 AM

    I've always felt that office suites that have non-MS formats as the save-defaults were greatly limiting themselves. If you want to co-exist and eventually take over, the way to do it is to not force users to think of save-as each time they save a document. Nobody will do save-as each time, and no one cares about file formats...unless that file format is not the MS standard. It's great that Symphony saves in MS-native formats. I actually like the look/feel of the OS X version too. Congrats IBM!

    ...Neil

  1. 3  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 12/9/2008 7:10:51 AM

    Very well deserved. Congratulations to the entire Symphony team. (Can we have a repeat of "Kashmir" at Lotusphere?) :)

    Lotus Symphony is great story very much still in its early stages.

    How about IBM spend a few bucks on some full page ads in the major newspapers (e.g. Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today, etc.)

    The timing is quite right for a particularly pointed message at the large U.S. Government agencies that are already Lotus Notes shops to consider saving a boat load of money by not upgrading to Office 2007 and simply upgrade to Lotus Notes 8 with Symphony.

    On a semi-related note, one could also make the argument for building up the advocacy of the Open Document formats when it comes to health care reform.

    From the Obama Transition website ({ Link }

    Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems: Use health information technology to lower the cost of health care. Invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.

  1. 4  Mike McP http://www.openntf.com/mPortal | 12/9/2008 9:39:04 AM

    Agreed that the timing is right to push this cost-savings. I'm sure this is already in the works, but major ads, followed by success stories as adopters are tracked, then another ad campaign high-lighting the case studies.

  1. 5  Palmi   | 12/9/2008 10:17:59 AM

    For every GREAT Product there are great people behind it. Great Job :)

  1. 6  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/9/2008 12:09:42 PM

    @3 / @4 pretty hard to justify major advertising for a no-charge product. So far 3 million+ downloads without it...IBM sales teams, word of mouth, press, analyst activity seem to all be strong drivers already

  1. 7  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 12/9/2008 3:45:31 PM

    @6 - Wouldn't it be the very same argument to develop a no-charge product in the first place? You're also trying to unlock the tight grip of the proprietary Microsoft Office document formats.

    Plus for large institutions, there is the much higher likelihood of selling one of those nice support contracts.

    Word of mouth is quite good and quite powerful; but once in a while some good ol' fashioned advertising is in order.

    I would also think think that there is the opportunity to play a little on "guilt by association." Meaning use the almost universal fear and lambasting of Vista to help bring down office.

    e.g. Does the thought of upgrading to Vista just simply scare the living daylights out of you? How about dealing with the new Microsoft Office 2007 document formats? Well, how about this.... And it won't cost you a thing in licensing costs.

    The simple act of taking out a large number of ads would generate more buzz about the story itself and hopefully would get some play on CNBC, Bloomberg, etc. and ultimately get people talking about why they still pay (huge sums of money) for Microsoft Office.

  1. 8  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/9/2008 5:12:11 PM

    Henry, I don't need to be persuaded as to the value of advertising. My comments are a reflection of the business plan and current go-to-market. At this moment, Symphony advertising is not an option, especially not TV. You have been around IBM software long enough to know how unlikely this is.

  1. 9  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 12/9/2008 8:32:51 PM

    Ed - I never said advertising on TV, just newspapers. The idea was that something "bold" might get the business TV shows talking about Symphony / cost of Microsoft to the enterprise.

  1. 10  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/10/2008 12:21:19 AM

    It would take a *lot* of ads to be noticed enough to be discussed in such venues.

  1. 11  Jay Zeltzer  | 12/10/2008 11:07:42 AM

    Congrats to the Symphony team for another award!!!!!

    The idea of advertising Symphony is not so far fetched. For better or worse, the majority of IBM advertising is not tied to revenue producing products. With the exception of Netfinity, it appears the goal of IBM advertising is to promote the IBM brand and/or engage the viewer to start a dialog with IBM. The current marketing campaigns on Innovation and Green Initiative is a case in point.

    Although Lotus Symphony is not a revenue producing product , I do believe its a door opener to engage IBM clients on the topic of saving money and improving business process. From a Lotus perspective, Lotus Reps and BPs can leverage Symphony into a discussion on Lotus Notes/ Composite Apps , Lotus Expeditor, WebSphere Portal, Quickr , ST etc.

    Personally, I could care less if we grow from 3M free seats to 100M free seats but an advertising campaign that can position IBM and Lotus with CFO and/or CIO is a big win.