Name Reuse: The Good and the Bad

We all know IBM does a good job on software reuse. But where the company needs to do some fine-tuning is with its project name reuse. For example, back when Lotus was known as "Lotus" and not "IBM Lotus" it rolled out a DOS-based integrated office package called "Symphony"--a wordprocessor, charting program, database program, and communications app. By all accounts, it was the football equivalent of an offensive lineman--big, bulky, and slow. Which is odd since the entire program was loaded into memory, leading you to think it ought to run fast like, well, a fleet-footed running back.

In any event, Symphony eventually went away, but Symphony did not. That is, the Symphony moniker was reused as IBM Lotus Symphony, a set of applications consisting of a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, and presentation program. Unlike that Symphony, this Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, which means users aren't locked into proprietary file formats.

IBM has now released Beta 2 of the freely available Symphony and the biggest change is in--you guessed it--performance. According to its developers, this release is 50 percent faster when opening Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, 20 percent faster when opening ODP presentations, and exhibits improvements when saving content. Hmmm, maybe IBM finally has its running back.

But back to its name reuse...When Lotus was "Lotus," another integrated office package--this one for the Macintosh--was Jazz. And it was a real mess. But that didn't stop IBM from rolling out another Jazz, which is a joint project between IBM Rational and IBM Research to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software lifecycle. By all accounts this Jazz is as good as that Jazz was bad.

So what's next? TopView? OS/2?

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 05:01 PM  Permalink