Wow!! Imagine a new version of Lotus Symphony for the Mac. I remember when Lotus announced Modern Jazz for the Mac, but never delivered after Microsoft Excel took off so well. Modern Jazz for the Mac and Symphony for the PC had one big limitation that kept it from selling. No Macros.
Now according to MacNN.com, IBM is releasing a version of OpenOffice for Windows, Mac and Linux that they will call Symphony. It has no relationship with earlier versions other than it will open and write to Symphony formats.
The big difference between OpenOffice 3.0 and Symphony 1.2 is the feature set available. While OpenOffice 3.0 offers a database and a drawing program, Symphony doesn’t. The other issue is that at least in the beta format, it doesn’t support the newer Office document formats.
BTW – I forgot to mention that since it is based on OpenOffice, it will be free, even after it finishes its beta run.
To read the complete preview at MacNN click here.
