“IBM and leading Linux distributors Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat are planning to work together with their hardware partners to deliver Microsoft-free personal computing choices with Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony in the <Dr Evil voice>one billion-unit</Dr Evil voice> desktop market worldwide by 2009.”

So far we are not one of the ‘hardware partners’ but for those curious about what the Lotus Symphony office suite looks like, here it is running on the webbook.

This is the wordprocessor:

and the spreadsheet:

and surprise surprise it does presentations too:

It wasn’t the easiest thing to install. In fact it took ages and I had to install it from the command line. The point of Symphony is that it is an office suite inside an Eclipse framework. If you don’t know or care what an Eclipse framework is then you probably don’t need Symphony and you are better off with the OpenOffice.org suite that comes with the webbook.

So there you have it, IBM’s “Microsoft-free personal computing choice”, running on the webbook.

Tip: Don’t eat yellow snow, even on YellowDay.