Ed Brill: Two different analyst views of Lotus Symphony from Lotusphere

A Symphony snapshot from Ed Brill – excerpt:

In the long term, though, Burton's Guy Creese understands our body language correctly.  What we're ultimately looking to accomplish is to open this market to the idea that desktop productivity is ripe for innovation.  Today, that innovation is blocked by the Microsoft hold on the space.  Once we get past that, IBM and many, many other vendors can start to deliver true innovation in helping users be more productive with documents.  Our labs and research teams have tons of great ideas, and we highlighted many of these at Lotusphere last week.  Even more will start to come to the fore in the future, and we can all expect to benefit from that evolution.

I have to wonder if Ed and others at IBM have invested much time exploring Office 2007, or saw the Office Web Applications demo at Microsoft PDC late last year.  There’s definitely lots of innovation going on in the productivity application market, but it’s not coming from IBM.  Microsoft, in contrast, is creating lots of new opportunities by sincerely supporting open standards such as Open XML and ODF, and by embracing the software + services model in a consistent manner.

Ed Brill