The New York Times seemed to hail the arrival of Lotus Symphony open source word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software as if it was some kind of manna from heaven. But of course Google Docs has been offering its package of the same software for free over the internet for a while now — and when I went to the Lotus Symphony web page to download the software package and try it out, I had to go through a cumbersome set of registrations even to look at full demonstrations. That wasn’t cool. Then there was the downloading, which took me 18 hours. I know, the servers might have been overloaded, so I could overlook that. But when finally I had downloaded the 140 MB beastie and started the setup program, all I got was this:
Glory be — I can have the experience of beating my head against a computer screen with confusing error messages, just like in the 1990s! For Free! Wow!
It looks like Lotus Symphony isn’t ready for prime time. Note to PR division: check to see that software works before promoting it. I may try the package it again, in a few months, if I find myself thinking about it, maybe. Until then, I’ll stick with the free stuff that does what it’s supposed to.
“Inflating”? Whatever happened to unzipping files?
And “DEPLOY”???? What’s with the militaristic language?
It looks like when the language moves from the bedroom to the battlefield, the result is something that doesn’t work. Judging by all the messages in the forum, no one else can start up the program either.
They could always try a surge.