I was quite enthusiastic until the word "Lotus" appeared.

It makes Notes look like a good email client. Quite an achievement.

-A.

It's a bit more user-friendly than Red Hat...

Always amuses when the 'not quite as fervent as Mac Vs M$' bashing starts for Lotus. Sadly I support Lotus products and can quite happily say that while the IBM/Lotus flavour of Open Office (aka Symphony) may not have anything like the number of bells/whistles which the M$ offering has, it does have all you need and they tend to work quite well. To introduce a parallel as a target to be shot down, M$ may be a space shuttle but that's not much good for shipping plebs by the thousand to Marbella, far better to use the IBM/Lotus 777.

I have long given up trying to understand why a Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Presentation Graphics suite needs to come on a DVD and if I was interested in producing Desktop Publishing style tomes I would use a bespoke package or else pass the plain text to a Publishing House to do the formatting. Simple tools for simple people.

As the man say *Flame on*

Strange, I always equated Microsoft to their being IBM's little brother, so IBM have always been into the PC stealthily ...... even should they be more interested in Big Boys Toys as a SMART Cover.

With Microsoft floundering at the moment, it is not surprising that Big Brother enters the Field of Play in Hardware .......Mechanical Assembly, which can always accept MS Software, as well as any other.

How very Catholic ...... Give me the Virtual Machine Child, and we will Program IT to need Software.

i think you're being a bit harsh - lotus has a wealth of top software in it's portfolio...there's ummm.......well.....um......123 was kind of 'alright' in it's day?

oh - and sidekick was umm....'ok' too - wasn't it?

<ahem>

Does that mean the 300GL is on its way back ??

Does this mean they will be shipping with PC-DOS or OS/2?

I am Austrian, I'm in IT but I never heard of the company named Vdel...

OS/2 - with windows 3.1 in 'enhanced' mode...... :-)

"M$ may be a space shuttle"

How very apt an analogy. The Space Shuttle is half of a design with a kludged-together launch package which causes the catastrophic loss of the complete system in 40% of the deployed instances.

Using ODF, your documents will remain yours forever, unlike using MS Office, where you will be at the mercy of the upgrade cycle and will find your documents unreadable in a few years' time.

There's no need to be nasty to the Eastern Europeans anymore! I mean Notes - that's just cruel! Are they trying to start WW3!?!?!

I'll have the parka with the legend "Notes stands for 'NOT a real Email Solution'"....

Judging by some of the Lotus Notes migration projects I've been involved with, that statement is pretty true, but not in a positive way...

Lotus Notes Sucks...

It sucks so hard, it can suck monkey balls through a straw, whilst wearing a face mask and with little holes punched into the side of the straw to reduce the pressure... yes it sucks that hard...

As for the rest of the Lotus stable, I give it a 'meh' it's alright, seems more stable than some of the microsoft stuff, but with a few less whistles. Exchange isn't brilliant, don't get me wrong, I've had my fair share of battles with that beastie over time, and SharePoint can leave something to be desired in the document sharing realm, but their gold standard, angelic applications when compared to Notes.

Just in case you don't get what I'm trying to say it's this, NOTES SUCKS!!!!!

You see that flame? You see the small line at the bottom of it? That's a Notes Installation CD that is...

Well, urm, it did but wasn't that a long time ago?

One other thing, I originally thought Ralph was telling porky's when he suggested googling 'World's Worst Application'

He wasn't and I did, and somehow I feel a lot happier now, thanks Ralph.

I was under the impression that the shuttle had been deployed over 110 times, with 2 catastrophic failures that isn't quite 40%.

I don't think IBM has ever viewed Microsoft as its little brother, at least not after they saw the first demo of Windows NT. That's when one IBM vice president reportedly said he wanted to put an ice pick into Bill Gates's head. When IBM realized that they didn't control the PC operating system, they were furious at Microsoft and at themselves for allowing the PC to become an open hardware standard.

IBM has been working against Microsoft ever since, they were a major force beyind the US and EU legal actions against Microsoft, and they've supported Linux in part to attack Microsoft and win back parts of that market.

Can IBM make an ersatz PC that sells? Walmart tried a few times and failed.

I like the idea. RHEL is a good choice for business and Lotus doesn't mean that you can't use Evolution and Open Office.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. IBM are still a huge company and whilst this may be a small step back into the desktop market I will be keeping a close eye on how this develops. Could be the first steps to something bolder and more interesting.

"It's a bit more user-friendly than Red Hat..."

... and a bit more ugly-sounding name to the common user =(

I don't know about Notes as e-mail client, but Notes as a collaborative tool wasn't bad at all. At the very least, it was much, much better as a "new education" platform than its successors at my college: Blackboard, and some half-baked Blackboard-ish "thing" in-house development that followed.

I miss LearningSpace...

Lets hope this doesn't hit Red Hat too hard. As previously mentioned, the 300GL was an absolute dog in hardware terms. The last thing Linux needs is to be shown up running on crap hardware.

Or perhaps its an IBM ploy to ship more overpriced and under-performing pSeries fridges...?

and LOTUS means Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious...

Mine's the one with "Warp 4 Merlin" on the back

I knew I would find it, and I did.

Some Ubunuista yapping that his fetish is more friendly.

But, of course, everyone knows that pop-up menus in a Mac style bar at the top of the screen are the most friendly kind. Indeed, they are the only kind we should be allowed to think about.

Also, everyone knows that an desktop setup that makes it very difficult to run anything not placed on the menus by the vendor, or to customize anything, is better.

What was I thinking! I will immediately burn all my boxes that run KDE or Openbox, and enter a monastery to pray for deliverance from my UI sins.

He's Wrong.....

For the record.. The worst application (Office automation category) Is in fact UNIPLEX.

On second thoughts, make that all categories.

Coming in a very close second would be EtherNIM....

Third in line to the throne is anything written in Java,,,,

Why is it people think computing started in 1990??????

Bad applications have been around for 50 odd years... ;)

Randall.

Hmmm...is every launch an instance of deployment, or is every shuttle an instance?

As soon as I see some elite responder drop those magic bombs - M$, Windoze, Winblows, and all their variants, I immediately skip to the next post.

Thanks to people who do that, I save a great portion of my workday. Keep up the irrelevance!

Fighting MS with Lotus Notes???

PS: Paris since she has brighter ideas than that.

> Some Ubunuista yapping that his fetish is more friendly.

Nope, I'm a Windows user. I'm currently evaluating a few Linux builds and I found I could get to grips with the Ubuntu UI more quickly than Red Hat, or Mandriva or OpenSuse for that matter.

> But, of course, everyone knows that pop-up menus in a Mac style bar at the top of the screen are the most friendly kind. Indeed, they are the only kind we should be allowed to think about.

Surely Gnome is customisable?

> Also, everyone knows that an desktop setup that makes it very difficult to run anything not placed on the menus by the vendor, or to customize anything, is better.

See above.

> What was I thinking! I will immediately burn all my boxes that run KDE or Openbox, and enter a monastery to pray for deliverance from my UI sins.

Fill your boots man. Anything to reduce the stress, eh?

Kind of missing the point - it ain't Lotus Notes, it's an IBM'd version of Open Office they're pushing.

"I have long given up trying to understand why a Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Presentation Graphics suite needs to come on a DVD and if I was interested in producing Desktop Publishing style tomes I would use a bespoke package or else pass the plain text to a Publishing House to do the formatting. Simple tools for simple people.

As the man say *Flame on*

Kevin, I have wondered that myself. The problem is with the 'Dream Merchants of Software' who over-promise to sell their bloatware, promising every office drone will be a better writer, financial wizard and an insta-graphic designer -- all-in-one -- thus -- making the company more profitable. Complete and utter nonsenses. I agree with you, keep it simple. Oh yes, no flame from me! Cheers!

/

...and it wasn't the best thing I've ever seen, therefore all Lotus products, forever, suck. Yeah, that's good thinking. Hyundai cars suck, too, because I rode in the back seat of an Excel back in 1986.

Why can't closed mind = closed mouth?

Who incorporates who ?

This would have to give windows some thinking to do.

Lotus notes and OpenOffice.

Red Hat and Lotus

A combination, yes a combination--What a concoction. i believe the outcome yields dividend

Because Lotus Notes on Linux is only supported on RedHat and SuSE

Maybe not now, but Ubuntu support for mid year has already been announced. I've actually run Notes8 on Ubuntu already, but suspect this is a 'support' announcement rather than actually making it work...

http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/enterprise/news/index.cfm?newsid=7193&print