IBM gets hip with 'cool' Ubuntu PC deal

IBM is today expected to announce expanded backing for Ubuntu in a desktop and collaboration software deal to challenge Microsoft's Windows and Office. Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, has agreed to re-distribute IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity suite with its public Linux repositories. More details are expected later …

[Stan]

Going back to calling mine 'debian based'

Great news but 'IBM' and 'cool' should only be used when talking about indestructible keyboards or mainframes with enough power to run an average population's IT needs, other than that IBM does not do cool. More of an anti-cool really, although all the above 'cool by IBM' products qualify by being top quality, so them calling ubuntu cool has nice implications :)

Well boil my dangleberries if linux isn't kicking serious arse this year, 2.7% of new PC sales, dell, HP, all the little ultra mobile thing manufacturers and now a big thumbs up from big blue, I'll stick my neck on the line and call this the year of desktop linux.

cheers

[Will Godfrey]

Revenge is a dish best seved cold

How lng has IBM waited for this opportunity?

[Dave Jones]

How to please Microsoft

The Redmondites must be cackling with glee. I can't think of anything more likely to put people off LInux than by packaging it with anything from Lotus, especially anything related to the hated Notes. This is classic suit-think: it doesn't matter if the product is crap, it just matters that we can sell it. Come to think of it, that's been IBM-think since forever.

[Skinny]

Yeah but...

Lotus Symphony is just one step closer to forcing Lotus Notes on people...

Actually I know that's BS but I am scarred for life from past experiences with Notes, so anything that has to do with Lotus deserves some poorly thought out fist waving (In text form)

Notes sucks, ergo all Lotus products must also suck Q.E.D.

Bloody Notes, and it's stupid interfaces, and crappy design, I want those years of my life back damn it.

[Robert E A Harvey]

Jolly good

I've quite enjoyed using the Lotus stuff instead of MS office. It seems a quicker and more stable product than MS, and quicker than OOo. The user interface is different, but so what? We used to be used to that back when I was alive, slavish copying of other people's menus used to be a bad thing!

In a market where for 99% of users a wp or ss only needs to be good enough, it is more than good enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news ...

@Stan:

IBM does a heck of a lot of cool stuff. More cool than most - thanks to investing about $6B a year in research. See http://www.research.ibm.com/about/top_innovations_history.shtml

@Dave Jones:

You miss the point. IBM has "supported" Redhat and SUSE as "enterprise ready" distributions for a long time. The more recent support of Ubuntu by IBM is recognition of their success in the marketplace, and that they've earned a place at the top table.

Re Notes: Love it, hate it, who cares? This was all about Symphony, which is an alternative to MS Office. Nothing to do with Notes at all.

[Lars]

Lots of flaming about lotus notes

Perhaps I am only the lucky guy who never had to use it.

On the other hand all this flaming makes me a bit interested in trying it.

Well, I will probably not, but still the thing is that when you master a system, know it then it is never that bad.

Perhaps those who flame LT are a bit like those Windows users who flame Linux without any experience in Linux

[Trix]

@lars

"the thing is that when you master a system, know it then it is never that bad"

BWAHAHAHAHAHAH! The whole point of Notes is the only people who "master" it are the little troglodytes who like picking their noses and coding in caves, and bitching about normal users who don't understand the gnomic buttons or menus in the client and who refuse to "leverage" all the "features" that no-one would want to use in a million years.

The thing about Notes is it's a database with an application platform written around it. User-friendly and optimised for email, it is not (although it is much better). Exchange went down that route for a wee while ("yes, we're an application platform too! Write lots of code and use the fantastic Jet database and all those transparent *koff* Exchange hooks to store things in it!) before they realised that their core functionality was storing email in the database, allowing shared access to said emails when required (via shared mailbox and/or public folders), and the Spawn of Schedule+. Although with the proliferation of server "roles" in Exchange 2007, I really wonder what they're currently playing at (new and enhanced service continuity features - clustering, replication, are good, though).

[Anonymous Coward]

100% Microsoft free

"Perhaps those who flame LT are a bit like those Windows users who flame Linux without any experience in Linux"

Perhaps. Flaming may be a silly thing to do, but being biased against one platform or vendor over another is fair game.

I don't have to be unbiased when I choose products. I can choose products for whatever reason I like or for no reason at all. I might flip a coin to choose, or I might choose one over the other simply because I didn't trust the other company.

In fact for businesses, trust is far more important than apparent quality of the product and cost of ownership. If you don't trust another company, then you don't do business with them, as simple as that. The company I work for has a strict No-Microsoft-products policy, simply because we as a business do not trust Microsoft as a business. We don't care whether Microsoft products are good or bad, whether they are good value for money or not. We don't trust Microsoft and therefore we won't buy nor use any of their products, period.

Yes, this makes us biased, and yes, we don't know Microsoft products that well since we don't use them, but we have the right to be biased and ignorant, it is not anyone else's business, it's our business. We decide, not anyone else. We don't even have to explain our choices to anybody (except our shareholders).

We like it this way and we are doing well. Even if we didn't do well, it still wouldn't be anybody else's business (except for our shareholders).

All those Joe Publics out there think that the world owes them justification for how it conducts business, but they are delusional. Joe Publics don't matter and to be biased is perfectly legitimate. Get over it already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Notes Is The Devil

Lotus Notes makes Microsoft Office look streamlined--I've been stuck using Notes for email for the last couple years, and my friends *at IBM* feeling sorry for me and all seem to hate it as much as I do. Slow as a dog and an interface for email that only a Notes developer could love

[Liam]

lotus notes

was an odd one - you cannot devlop applications faster than with notes (i left my notes developer position in january)

the problem is that once you get something basic up you spend ages trying to make it not look shite - to be honest im the only person i ever knew who made some decent looking notes apps lol... let alone webapps - the problem is its a system that coders can use - often with no design skills at all. Not to mention all the little pain in the arse issues with the web too...

ahhh i remember those days lol

[James Anderson]

Message to IBM

The "Lotus" brand name has negative value.

Too many people were exposed to the awful Notes UI for too long, and, for too long the Lotus marketing team denied there was a problem and kept up the "you just don't understand" mantra.

The "Lotus" brand is slightly more appealing than Chernobyl or Smallpox but a lot less than Lada or Arthur Andersen.

Time to cut your losses and dump the brand (along with all the arrogant f***wits who maintained they were right and all thier users were wrong).

[Wesley Williams]

Notes is actually good now (don't choke)

Believe me when I say that I have shared everyone's hatred for Lotus Notes end user experience, but honestly, version 8 and above are so much better. It's actually a pleasure to use Notes now and although I realise some people may never go back, it really has changed for the better.

[ryan]

@Liam

Ugly apps in created in Notes are nothing new, but ugly web-apps in notes?

If you were the only person in your company able to click 'Pass-thru HTML' i suspect the problems go way beyond creating ugly applications ;)

flame icon for obvious reasons.

[Liam]

you only seem to know notes email

thats like saying windows in a platform for msn and nothing more.

ok, i quite often was heard saying far too loud 'god, notes is shit' but for appl development its actually not bad. their problem is that they didnt realise people might use it for a webapp server too. almost any notes app you see looks like a 5 year old has designed it. to be honest how many coders do you know who can actually design well?

i had the 'lovely' job of beautifying about 40 applications to make them look 1/2 decent. little things like measurements being in inches and cm (wtf? no pixel values for anything and how do CMs work for screen???) and saying notes had CSS support - when in fact inline css didnt work (wtf? thats why its cascading you idiots). DTD problems etc.

its not a bad platform to develop on and ive never found any other platform where you can design a pretty complex system in such a short time. the problem is that a lot of coders, along with being shit designers, do not understand usability.

[ryan]

inline css

out of curiosity, was this in notes 6.xx or something?

I'm pretty sure inline css has worked in 6.55 onwards, although you could just as easily insert it as a stylesheet resource, or give a Page the type "text/css" if you wanted to embed computed text in the stylesheet itself.

regardless, i'll agree that most developers aren't particualrly good at graphic design, but then thats like complaining that your mechanic sprayed your car whilst he was MOTing it and did a crap job!

[ryan]

i can't believe i'm actually defending lotus notes on the internet :x

and $$Frontmatter worked from, like, 6.53 onwards so you shouldn't really have had any DTD/Doctype issues.

granted, notes produced some remarkably shoddy generated HTML back in the day, <FONT> tags in particular upset me, but it's incredibly simple to just wrap your Notes content in valid pass-thru and produce perfect HTML

[Liam]

hmmmm

@ ryan.... not as far as i know mate (regarding css) last i used was 6.5.5 or something. the problem being a main stylesheet. if you use a main stylesheet (which we did) you cannot then overrule with inline - which is the main point of CASCADING in css :)

who uses pass-thru html? you do for specific bits but almost all lotus webapps look shite. what i was saying is that i can make some nice ones - but due to lots of notes limitations its a pain. for example wrong DTDs that you have to overrule etc. the stupid pathing - having to add 0 views etc to links.

as i said i can make nice apps in notes but the lack of many normal design features (pixels, relative values etc) arent there.

im not anti-notes - made some nice cash for a few years developing in it. its just frustrating at times.

[Liam]

AHHHH

to be honest ive never seen $$Frontmatter - not sure i got to use 6.53 for webapps. i always tended to use agents to do anything fancy (as you control 100% of the markup).

[kondor vlastos]

@Trix

And the award goes to -

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAH! The whole point of Notes is the only people who "master" it are the little troglodytes who like picking their noses and coding in caves, and bitching about normal users who don't understand the gnomic buttons or menus in the client and who refuse to "leverage" all the "features" that no-one would want to use in a million years."

Why have all assumed that Ubuntu is Linux? Is it truly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is quite popular as a desktop OS inside IBM

So it's good to see IBM supporting it externally also.

As for Symphony, I've started using this recently (especially for spreadsheets) and I much prefer it to the latest MS Office (with that stupid ribbon interface that is making it harder for me to find anything).

The Symphony Spreadsheet has all the same functionality I use in Excel (yes I even use formulas), but the added advantage of:

- documents are saved in ODF format by default

- supports .csv files that don't use comma as the delimiter (something Excel chokes on - and the reason I tried Symphony)

As for Lotus Notes - you either like it or hate it (there doesn't seem to be much middle ground). Personally I much prefer Notes (for email) than Outlook (remember Notes is the client, so it's MS equivalent is Outlook - you are actually comparing Domino and Exchange when you talk about the server side). And for the record, I'm not a coder and being a normal user I only complain about interfaces that are not easy and intuitive (as many have suggested, you really should try Notes 8). You've got me on the nose picking though (you've not experienced true pleasure until you've mined a green nugget from so deep in your nasal passages that it feels like it uncoils from around the very base of your brain stem - paraphrased from an old joke book I read many years ago)

Disclaimer - all comments and opinions are my own and may not reflect the positions and opinions of anyone with whom I have an association (eg friends, family, employer etc).

AC because I'm posting from work

[Fred]

Notes? Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice!!!

Why all the irrelevant posting about notes? Ubuntu ships with Open Office, and even if IBM did muck it, its just a matter of downloading and installing it!

Endof!