Tech: welcome back to Symphony

Some of us are still waiting for PCs to return us to the performance levels we were used to with DOS, before Windows' insane demands for system resources made ever faster machines perform ever slower.

In the days of DOS, word processing in the corporate market was dominated by Word Perfect and spreadsheets by Lotus 123. Databases were dominated by Ashton Tate's DB series. And, for lovers of presentation software, well, suffice it to say that our editor in chief wrote his own which was something of a novelty in those pre-PowerPoint days.

But someone had the idea of Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Databases all into one package. To be fair, they were not very well integrated but they did all have a common interface and a common set of keyboard shortcuts, and they all shared peripherals management which meant that it was only necessary to set up the printers once for the combined pack.

The market was, largely, split between two packages: Lotus Symphony and Ashton Tate's Framework.

Those who were numbers orientated preferred Symphony, partly because it used the 123 control set and so they were used to it. But those who used mainly word orocessing or databases preferred Framework.

When Windows appeared, with it came Word for Windows and Microsoft Excel - and although there was no true integration between them the attraction of the Windows back-end for peripherals management and for cut and paste meant the end of DOS based suites.

And for some reason, both Lotus and Ashton-Tate just gave up. Lotus bought out another word processor and ran the windows version as its product and launched 123 for Windows. It bundled those with a database and presentation software but the integration was really little more than cosmetic in relation to the look and feel and an exploitation of the Windows platform.

Framework - which was so well documented that we still, twenty years on, use the Framework III manual as a spreadsheet reference work - simply disappeared, and Ashton-Tate fell into some sort of black hole from which seemingly it has never emerged.

But Lotus was bought by IBM. Of course, what IBM wanted was 123 because IBM had failed to put any software of any significance on the corporate desktop. In the package it got the other Lotus products, including the desktop database Approach. Like it's MS counterpart, this product seems basically unfathomable to the vast majority of PC users.

But now, IBM is to resuscitate Lotus Symphony. Well, kind of. It's not going back to the 123 based product and making a Windows version.

What is is actually doing is rebranding OpenOffice.Org's product which is rapidly gaining prominence as a viable rival to MS Office.

And it's giving it away free. That trumps MS's student offer of Office for USD60. But of course, MS's offer comes with strings - emotional and financial: it's hard to give up the software you learned on, and MS knows that by flooding schools, colleges and universities, it keeps the lion's share of later sales.

IBM is not the only one to give away a version of OO.o. Sun, owns OOo but licences it for free use. Novell which owns SUSE brands and provides automatic updates for the version it installs as part of its SUSE OSS10 free Linux Operating system download.

Symphony isn't as full-featured as MS Office. But the truth is that the vast majority of features in feature-rich software are used by a tiny minority of users. In word processing, the range of features used by most users is incredibly small. Symphony focusses on the popular parts. So it's smaller, faster and easier than MSO.

Critics say that OS software comes without support. But anyone who has tried to get support from MS knows that, except for initial support, it only comes at a price. And most good OS software now has a paid-support option in addition to the large community support that will often solve problems within minutes on a self-help basis, and a considerably more effective basis than the self-help bulletin boards that proliferate across the web for so many other subjects.

IBM's only currently very successful product that appears on desktops is Lotus Notes - and the latest version, v8 due to be announced on Friday of this week but widely leaked has a number of open source elements including a proper implementation of XML, something Microsoft's Outlook cannot match - indeed MS tried to get its XML in Outlook certified recently and failed, demonstrating that MS continues to try to move standards to suit itself.