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Microsoft Porting Applications To Linux (Really!)
Erbo writes "We've heard the rumors before, more times than we can count, but this time WinInfo claims they're true: Microsoft is working with Mainsoft in Israel and a small French development team to port their apps to Linux, and possibly other Unices. No estimates on availability, of course. Their strategy seems to be to use an "Office for Linux" as a bridge to Windows, similar to Mac Office."
If this report is true, then I think this strategy could really backfire on Microsoft. It's more likely that people will use this as an exit point from Windows to Linux. After all, there's probably quite a few potential Linux users who would switch in a heartbeat, but hesitate because the Office suite on Windows is more productive and more polished. Now, with the option of running Word, Excel, or Outlook on Linux, that objection goes away. (And that's my honest opinion, really: their Office suite is probably the best one out there, but the Windows operating system has plenty of architectural flaws.)
At least it looks like they're operating and planning as two separate companies now. Maybe they think they're going to lose the DOJ case.
If it's true, this is a very smart move on Microsoft's part. They've left Linux to its own devices for some time now, and the lack of an office suite has been one of the biggest shortcomings of linux as an office desktop.
But now that viable linux Office suites are coming into their own, and the lack of one won't hold linux back much longer, they can jump in with MSFT Office and claim a big marketshare of office suite installations on Linux.
Hell, if they port DCOM and a bunch of apps that use it, then they can run with the 'it works better on Windows' strategy that they have used with Apple.
Plus, when you've got a few billion in cash, it's not a bad idea to have a few products in your back pocket waiting for hte right time to release.
SteveMS doesn't want what little there is of a Linux desktop market share.
Sure, Linux kicks ass on the server side. But aside from loving geeks who devote all their CPU and HD space to Linux, do you know a lot of people who actually think, 'Well, I'd get Windows, but Linux is so much *better* for desktop applications'?
Well, do you?
Linux is still catching up on Windows on the GUI and desktop side. Just look at the Holy Grail of Linux-related GUIs: 'We'll make it as nice-looking as MS'. As long as Linux is running after MS and Windows, they'll never be a threat.
Seriously, who would MS try to convince, here? If people are using Linux as a desktop, then there's something else aside from convenience and wide-ranging applications that they're interested in. Stability? Perhaps. But everybody else still figures stability is a small price to pay for prettiness, especially if autosave is on.
Sorry. MS isn't porting anything to Linux because, let's face it, on the desktop side it's so little of a threat it's laughable.
This is one of Microsoft's classic plays. When they see something that they think might threaten them, they either make an announcement or "leak" information regarding some great new MS Vaporware that's coming up. The idea is to "freeze" the marketplace, and get customers to avoid buying or adopting the competing technology until MS has its own crappy version in "barely usable" mode.
This is clearly a response to the Gnome Foundation announcements. The future of non-Microsoft desktops suddenly got a whole lot brighter this week. Microsoft must do everything it can to steer people away from this up-and-coming technology. If they can get people to say to themselves "I'll just wait for MS Office to arrive before I try Linux" then they've succeeded.
Still, even if it's true, I can't see how it'd be very good if they're using MainWin (basically the equivalent of WineLib) to do the port. While the entire Gnome Foundation initiative is centering around CORBA and the Bonobo framework, a ported MS Office will still be using a ported DCOM. Furthermore, it'll look and feel like a Windows app, right around the same time that Linux apps are starting to take on a more unified look and feel. It'll only talk to itself. In other words, MS Office will feel as isolationist and foreign in the future standardized Gnome desktop as the current version of StarOffice feels in the current Linux desktop. Who wants that? More importantly, who wants that and at a cost of $500?
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When has there ever been something not true on the internet? Come on, if you can't believe everything on Slashdot, what the hell can you believe?
-B
For those who don't recognise that reference- first of all, furrfu- second of all, this is the real leverage that comes with having Office on a platform. Given the expectation that 'oh, Office is on platform X, therefore legitimising it', Microsoft can and does use this as a weapon. For example, they literally told Apple to kill off Quicktime or they'd kill Office for MacOS- the quote comes from an exchange like 'We think it would be better if Quicktime, uh, wasn't.' 'Let's get this straight, are you asking us to knife Quicktime for you- to knife our baby?' 'Yes, we're talking about knifing the baby'.
Should MS apps be established on Linux it'd be like that only instead of dealing with a single point of development and control, MS would be dealing with little groups and individuals, threatening them that if they didn't stop work on their projects, MS would kill Office for Linux (and presumably blame said developer). This degree of blackmail might not work on RMS types but there is a level where it is frightening. Basically it's a sort of extortion, and the point is to engender a climate of fear and obedience. Some of us (mac people into development) have been able to watch this sort of thing going on in the real world for longer than you linux people have... and yes it seems to be illegal, the antitrust case nailed them for JUST this sort of behavior. Now we've got to see if that sticks, or if they get to ignore that as well.
At any rate- there is no benefit from having Office available for your platform. None. There's no significant compatibility between versions, ports are never in synch, it takes large amounts of motivation for them to produce software even half good (i.e. IE for mac) and even if they do they take pains to use it to cut off your other options and change the 'territory' right out from under you so your choices are dead.
The people screaming 'nooooo!' are, ironically, a lot closer to the mark than the people screaming 'yay' here. You've got to look at the business practices that inevitably go along with this sort of 'beachhead'. These guys kill markets- that is their whole schtick. Why would you want them coming over and killing your market too, even if your market is largely mindshare instead of commercial? All it will do is kill your choices without giving you the supposed benefits you think you'd be getting. And that's because, as was repeatedly found by the judge in the antitrust case, they really make a special EFFORT to kill your choices and kill your market- we're not talking about 'network effects', we're talking 'knife the baby'. An MS guy actually accepted those words, mid-negotiation, as descriptive of what they were trying to do. How can that be right? How can that be a market?
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Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
This post has some merit. Unix people pay heed. I know plenty of people that have high uptimes with NT. Think about it, do you run XWindows on you high availability Web Server, Office Applications, games. No. Ill testify to the fact that the majority of BSODs can be directed linked to bad 3rd party drivers. When properly administered NT can be be stable. I know its hard to admit to, but please try. I dont run NT on my servers for diffret reasons. I have a strong belief that mission critical servers should not run GUIs... period. There is no point for a serious machine, one that you stake you business on, to have a GUI. UNIX is also very easy to customize. REmote administration on NT blows. developing mantainance code in NT is pain (PErl vs. Win32/MFC). The artitecture for UNIX is open, as opposes to windows which pretty much ties you into an all window solution. My $0.02 -Nathan
Porting DCOM to UNIX is one thing, but Office is another beast entirely. Microsoft nearly destroyed their market for Mac applications when they tried to offer a weak port of the Windows version of Office -- people simply started refusing to upgrade. These days, the two have pretty much completely different code -- you can't really port the Windows version of Office to any other OS, because they're joined at the hip with DLL-Hell, private system calls, etc.
I was at SUN when they announced "porting office applications to the "javaStation" (SUN's NC) back in '96.
Then of course they don't do it and everybody thinks there must be a problem with the JavaStations (which there was the OS sucked).
Now they are going to try and do the same thing with Linux... tell everyone... we are porting to Linux when they are Scared of linux because linux is going to eat the mid server market of win2000.
Then they will come out saying "It doesn't work" and spread FUD around it. I hope star office is as good as they claim, and I know MS can't diss the os like they dissed the javastation.
marc
Then no thanks. I tried IE for Solaris about a year ago. Any piece of software that seg faults because you hit the "compose" button is not for me. I'll stick with Gnumeri, AbiWord, pine, and vi thank you.
Joseph W. Breu
as strategic as this may sound, porting the MSOffice in its CURRENT form as you and I know it to Linux is totally contradictory to their plan to try and take over the world with .net, effectively being the one mammoth server for ALL productivity /office apps making each and every one of us nothing more than a SUBSCRIBER to Word or Powerpoint sucking down the precious functionality from .net like a glorified dumb terminal, constantly paying MS for the privledge of using their precious Office.
Porting an installable, standalone MSOffice to Linux doesn't help them get there so I would suggest you're crazy if you think this will ever see the light of day.
Now, they may VERY well be porting some sort of ".net client" stuff to Linux. I'd expect that.
I definitely can see this as being true.
/. before, but I thought I'd refresh everyone's memory.
.doc and .xls formats into the market. Right now people are trying to compete with Wordperfect and StarOffice, but I am willing to bet that if Office made it to *NIX, that would spell the death knell for WP and SO (and who knows, maybe Corel along with them). Suddenly the few alternatives you have to office are gone. Not to mention that one of SO's big selling points is its supposed "MSOffice compatibility"... why would you bother if you could just run MSOffice natively?
For those that don't know (you certainly wouldn't from the article), Mainsoft produces a toolkit (MainWin) which implements the WinNT/2k kernel and MFC on various flavours of *NIX, including Solaris and Linux. This enables one to take a Win32/MFC program that was developed on windows and (in theory) have it work on *NIX just by linking to their MainWin libraries. The toolkit has been discussed some here on
I/we use the toolkit here at work (a MAJOR hardware company) to port our dev tools to *NIX, and we've had quite a positive experience with it. Sure there are problems here and there, but for the most part they're due to our windoze developers making assumptions based on the program being run in a win32 environment (things like endianess issues, or the fact that windows uses backslashes for dir separators rather than slashes). It has enabled us to port a product consisting of over 300,000 lines of code without having to rewrite the whole thing. I don't imagine Mainsoft would be having as hard a time porting Office as people are making out, not only because the toolkit is good IMHO, but because in my dealings with them they have seemed like a very sharp bunch of people.
"Now," you say, "why would Microsoft want to port Office to Linux? Isn't Linux their enemy?"
1) Further entrenching the
2) Doing this port will lend MUCH credibility in the public eye to MainWin. If they are lucky, then people will start organizing their multi-platform development strategies around it right from the get-go, and thus Microsoft will "lock them into" using the MFC development model. Right now people tend to use Mainwin to port apps they already have on Windows to *NIX... perhaps if MainWin got enough prestige people would decide right from the start that if they are doing a cross-platform app that they will do it in MFC and use MainWin to do the porting.
Do NOT underestimate this... Mainsoft (and through them, Microsoft) makes some serious bucks off of licensing/royalties for products that use MainWin, as their code is actually linked into yours. If you just make your app on windows and compile with Dev Studio, you pay no royalties, but with a MainWin ported app you are shipping with compiled libs that implement MFC and the NT kernel... that means $$ for Mainsoft and Microsoft.
It especially means $$ if people start deciding that they would like to forge off into the Linux arena because using MainWin is so much more attractive than doing a native port from the ground up. Companies that before were never even considering doing ports to *NIX might start thinking about it if this MSOffice port goes off well because they will say to themselves "shit, we hardly have to do anything ourselves to do this," even though that's not quite necessarily true.
This is very good for Linux in a way too... it means that you will be able to get much more of your favourite apps on your favourite OS.
Mechanik
It's a pitty it also works the other way around, use an Office for Linux as a Bridge from Windows. There is no one way sign on this bridge!
here
MSFT has an established business porting its applications to Solaris and HP/UX. This does not mean they will port to Linux.
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
What proof is there that this is more than a rumor? the only source is an annonymous Israeli developer... Does he even work for Mainsoft?
In Dante Alegheri's (sp?) Inferno, the center four regions of hell -- reserved for the worst kind of sinners -- are made up of a gigantic frozen ice plain.
The sinners are frozen into the ice, completely unable to move or respond to external stimuli...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Seriously though, it might not be too bad. For instance, the corporation I work for's e-mail standard is Outlook/Exchange which I'd like to be able to run on Linux (my primary desktop). I haven't found a suitable Outlook clone yet so I can get my mail easily. Incidentally, I tried the fetchmail thing, they don't have NTLM enabled and won't turn it on.
Not to mention how many times I've recieved e-mail documents containg Word or Powerpoint presentations that StarOffice couldn't convert very nicely.
I don't know about it being a bridge over to Windows, however, some good could come out of it. You'd think they would start by helping out the wine project, but then again, thats not M$'s style. They'll probably take the wine code and make it proprietary.
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
> Microsoft is working ... to port their apps to Linux
And in the anti-virus industry, there was MUCH rejoicing...
- Tim
Do you really think this isn't a direct response to the "GNOME foundation" announcement? I mean, come on people!
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