Lotus Symphony (IBM)

» see ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ibm's lotus symphony was the second free office suite that lived on my computer next to openoffice for a couple of years and rarely got opened. ibm announced it in september 2007 as a rebadged openoffice.org running inside an eclipse-based shell. the pitch was simple. corporate brand on top of free software, with ibm-paid support contracts on top of that. a lot of windows-shop engineers in turkey downloaded it around 2008-2009. not many kept it.

the product was caught between two layers nobody wanted to choose. underneath was openoffice itself, free and already installed on linux distros and on most engineering desktops that did not want to pay for microsoft office. on top was the eclipse rcp shell, which was familiar to java developers but loaded the entire java runtime before opening a.doc file. it was slower than the thing it wrapped. it had a tabbed document interface and a sidebar that nobody else's office suite had, which was nice for about a week. then you went back to libreoffice.

ibm announced the end of development on october 16 2014 along with the lotus brand sunset. by then sun had been bought by oracle and openoffice had been forked into libreoffice. the apache foundation inherited the original codebase. ibm donated symphony's code to apache and walked away. the lotus name died alongside it.

~ the record ~

~ the eclipse rcp problem ~

the eclipse rich client platform was ibm's bet on java-as-desktop in the 2000s. it powered lotus notes 8.5 and several enterprise products. the bet did not work outside ibm's own product line. java desktop apps from that era have a specific feel: slow startup, non-native widgets, fonts that never matched the operating system. symphony inherited all of that on top of an already-slow office-suite engine.

~ what got buried with the lotus name ~

lotus was a brand once. in the 1980s lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet that built the pc business market. notes was the collab software every consulting firm used through the 90s. ibm bought the company in 1995 and slowly dissolved the brand over twenty years. symphony's death in 2014 was paired with notes being sold off to hcl a few years later. by 2019 there was no lotus product left at ibm. the brand outlived its own products by maybe a decade.

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