Stephen Downes

The best comment I heard about IBM's new Symphony suite of (free) applications is that it is intended to make you forget about the old one. "Business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM's most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus 8." The Suite is probably best thought of as an update of the old Star Office, a Java-based set of applications intended mostly (but not exclusively) for a Linux user. I'm inclined to try out this suite, but they require you to register before you can access it, and you know how I feel about that - in my view, registration is a form of payment (especially since I'll be deleting the spam from here to Sunday).