Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3 276
walterbyrd writes "In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, 'Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:' IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. Further, IBM stated, 'Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.'"
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:5, Informative)
Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist (even if you include blatant malware in the competition). It is technically considered a "groupware" platform, but in practice it's almost exclusively used as an email/calendaring client, and it absolutely sucks at that, lacking the most basic features every other email program takes for granted.
Lotus -- OpenOffice (Score:4, Informative)
Latest versions of Lotus brand suite were based on OpenOffice. Symphony was just the Lotus style shell over it. There was no native version for years. Anyway, it is interesting how IBM can walk away from products with arms... Hard drives, ThinkPads, now Lotus...
OO support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will they be open-sourcing it? (Score:5, Informative)
Good News: Currently IP law *is* abandonware. It sunsets the monopolies.
Bad News: It sunsets about as fast as a Venusian day
We obviously need to fix the latter, but fortunately the Founding Fathers new these things should be 'limited'.
Now that Microsoft has decided to adopt the UI... (Score:5, Informative)
Gee and just after Microsoft decided to adopt the silly flat tile User Interface paradigm too. You would think its popularity would surge.
Unintuitive interface... check.
Nothing works quite right... check.
Square confusing tiles in a grid... check.
It should be the Windows 8 standard!
Re:How about cutting Notes? (Score:4, Informative)
PINE was awesome for its time.