IBM: Most Symphony users are Microsoft customers

Infoworld reports on a second beta version of Lotus Symphony, the Microsoft Office alternative: IBM released the second beta of its Symphony rival suite to Microsoft Office Tuesday, claiming that 88 percent of its users are Microsoft customers. This is kind of a curious statement. What else would they be? Anyway... Symphony is now in a beta 2 release with improved performance, access, and ease of use, the company said. IBM also released some statistics about people who are downloading and theoretically using the software, which is a document-creation and editing suite based on OpenOffice.org. Symphony is currently only available in English, but IBM said more than 50 percent of Symphony users are outside of the U.S., including what it said is a "sizable" group of users in Brazil and France. The top 10 nations in terms of download are the U.S., France, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, India, and Italy. About 12 percent of Symphony users are deploying it on Linux, the company said.  Related: Download Lotus Symphony Beta 2