Mary Jo posted an article called 'Will IBM’s Lotus Symphony succeed where other Office killers haven’t?'.
The gem in the new Symphony crowd is Lotus Notes 8. Now I've been luck enough to get to use the new Eclipse based client and the UI is indeed much prettier and generally nicer to use but still has that Notes familiarity around it so an existing user can pretty much get up and running straight away. So all in all abit of a tick in the box for IBM until you notice this ...
... the first two process are Notes 8, 116,812K & 53,900K. Hmm, so Notes 8 has a large memory foot-print! Which presents abit of a problem if you are running this application like so many people do under Citrix as the foot-print is greater than previous versions you are going to have less users per Citrix server, which means you will need more Citrix servers to support your existing number of clients.
IBM do have a Notes 8 lite client, which is basically Notes running without Eclipse where the footprint is much smaller but the UI basically looks no different from previous versions ... so the biggest reason to upgrade, i.e. a nicer UI isn't there. I would suggest IBM look at this matter as priority or the brave new world is going to mean a memory upgrade as well as switching office platforms, or more Citrix servers ... not attractive reasons for a business to migrate away from Office then.