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Download and install Symphony 3 Beta 2 in 20 easy to follow steps

by Volker Weber

Be careful at the actual download step and select HTTP instead of IBM Download Director. The choice is not obvious. Hey, we only do this so you don't have to. :-)

Comments

And be careful to not download Symphony 1.3 and wonder why the UI has not changed at all :-)
(and don't right click in a spreadsheet to show the context menu; I just could not close it any more and had to kill the process ->Mac Symphony).

And if you click on New Document, and nothing seems to happen, be patient. It is thinking.

I'd have thought Lotus Knows how much that download procedure sucks. In fact I thought they "Knows" that for quite some time, but nothing much has changed.

Reminds me of a shop assistant's response a few years ago when asked for a particular product. "Oh, we don't stock that item anymore - there wasn't enough demand. But, I do wish people would stop asking for them..."

IBM would probably claim that not enough users care about the download process for them to prioritise sorting it out, yet they get frustrated when we keep pointing out the flaws.

In fairness, after its downloaded, the install is similar to other office apps I have installed. But, they sure could make the download stuff better.

Open question to IBM - Who actually thinks making a site HARD TO USE is a good thing in this day and age? IBM is not a consumer focussed business. I get that. But Symphony is a consumer focused product. You want people to download it.

Look at popular free tools that are available for download - does their site work like this?

Jan-Piet, knowledge is not power. It does not matter what Lotus knows.

Stuart and Paul, they don't do it on purpose. IBM is a gigantic bureaucracy which shows once you get through the glossy layer. IBM can't do consumer products. They never could. Lotus once could, but they have been assimilated and have to follow the procedures in place.

The only thing you can do is to once in a while remind everybody that this is not normal, and one of these days, something wonderful might happen.

Oh, did they really come down to 20 steps :)....

Doesn't anyone in IBM (with some clout) look at this and say.. "wow, this download procedure really sucks! It soooo counter-intuitive and backward compared to the way the rest of the planet seems to download stuff... perhaps we should fix it ?"

But maybe I'm asking too much of an organisation that has more than 300,000 employees...sigh!

Reminds me of this old story :-)

"This is the story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody,
and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was
asked to do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that
Everybody wouldn't do it. Consequently, it wound up that Nobody told
Anybody, so Everybody blamed Somebody."

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vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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