IBM: Most Symphony users are Microsoft customers

November 14, 2007 —

IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its Symphony rival suite to Microsoft
Office, claiming that 88 percent of its users are Microsoft customers.

Symphony
is now in a beta 2 release, with improved performance, access and ease of use,
the company said. IBM also released some statistics about people who are downloading
and theoretically using the software, which is a document-creation and editing
suite based on OpenOffice.org.

Symphony is currently only available in English, but IBM said more than 50
percent of Symphony users are outside of the U.S., including what it said is
a "sizable" group of users in Brazil and France. The top 10 nations
in terms of download are the U.S., France, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain,
the Netherlands, India and Italy. About 12 percent of Symphony users are deploying
it on Linux, the company said.

IBM also said Tuesday it is promoting Symphony via demonstration videos on
the popular YouTube
video-sharing site.

IBM released Symphony in September as a free rival to Office and the company
now claims that there are more than 250,000 users. The software is comprised
of Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony
Presentations, a suite already included as part of Lotus
Notes 8.

Though Microsoft users are indeed kicking the tires of Symphony, they don't
seem to be swearing off of Office just yet. Pierre Avignon, an independent project
manager in West Newbury, Massachusetts, said he's been using Symphony's spreadsheet
application, but still keeps a copy of Office on his computer and uses both
for document creation.

Avignon said he prefers to use Symphony Spreadsheets for creating basic budgets
for projects and other tasks that don't require heavy lifting. He said he'd
still consider Excel for more complicated spreadsheets, such as those he wants
to include in PowerPoint presentations.

Avignon also noted that since he works mainly with nonprofits, he finds that
many people don't have Microsoft Office on their computers because of its cost.
But because Symphony is a free application, people can easily download it so
they can open a file he creates in Symphony Spreadsheets, Avignon said.

IDG News Service