Slashdot Mirror
MS Office for OSX? Why not for Unix as Well?
technode asks: "Apple
has released OSX, which appears to be an amalgam of NetBSD, and
NexTStep, and other stuff. There is, or will be, undoubtedly, a
'native mode' office suite for OSX. If there is an Office suite for
OSX, then why not for other Unixes? To do it once requires solving
the basic problem of mapping Office onto the Unix/X-windows API. Once
you have that piece, it seems like the only thing preventing a Linux
MS Office Suite is MS desire to preserve their OS market share. Technically,
this begins to seem a little bit like using one's market share in the
applications business to protect one's market share in the OS
business, which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust
no-no. What gives?" Most people don't seem to understand that
"native-mode" OSX isn't necessarily Unix compatible. Macs have had their own GUI toolbox for a long time, and I would assume that if
Office does show for OSX, that it would be an easy port to
other Unicies. This doesn't even go into the horrendous track record
with regards to security that Microsoft has garnered, especially
over the past few years. Does Unix really need Office at this
point? Update: 12/29 1pm EDT by C :The wording above is incorrect. To clarify: an OS X
version of Office would not be an easy port to Unix. Sorry for the miswording, there.
I was one of the beta testers for Office X. They've fixed many bugs since Office 2001 under Mac OS 9 and cleaned up the interface in Entourage. However, don't look for a full *nix port any time soon.
What MS Has done is comply with Apple's new API to the OS. Office X is NOT a UNIX application, it's still a Mac Application. All the code is Mac PowerPC code and uses Apple's "Carbon" and maybe some "Coco" code (but I'm not positive on the last one). It works well, it's fast and it's developed by a real Mac programming team as opposed to the abismal ports of Word 6 for example.
The truth of the matter is, Apple needs MS and MS Needs Apple (whether or not they want to admit it). I do not think that MS will be porting Office X to other *nixes any time in the future.
-- DuckWing
I have a full copy of Office for OS X 10.1. I'm running it right now. It's written using Carbon an Cocoa which are distinctly Macintosh libraries. Without reimplementing those systems, which is much of what Apple has been doing for the last... 10 years, there is no way office would run on Linux/Unix.
.NET implementations.
Right now porting Office in itself to Linux probably would be just as much of an undertaking as porting it to the Mac and Mac OS X was.
I think if we see Office every for Linux, it will most likely be running on wine or one of the free
All personal preferences of bloat, security, blah blah blah aside, I believe the primary reason that MS isn't very interested in MSOffice on the Linux desktop is because of product licensing control.
It's far too easy (in MS's view) for software to be copied under Linux. As a class of users, Apple users tend to be "more honest" about paying for their software. Windows users are questions in a non-business environment (heh, but a number of businesses also, really). But with XP, there will be more control over product licensing.
With Linux, they lose all this, or it becomes far harder to maintain. Also consider this issue: Cost of support for MS. With all the different distros available, I tend to think they mind find the cost of support under Linux as not yet being tolerable.
Linux has it's own version of "DLL Hell" in the libraries. With a MS product, it's *generally* pretty safe to force an upgrade of a MS DLL with a new MS DLL. But what about libraries they have no control over? The only way around that is to replicate the seemingly near 500MB of libraries. And then people complain about bloat!
I'm no big MS business model fan, but I find some of their products (Outlook not included) quite usable. I run Linux, OSX, Debian, FreeBSD, NT4, and Win2K here in my shop. I still use Windows/MSOffice for business work, because I have yet to find anything as good as MSOffice for Linux. Sad, but true, from MY perspective. Anyways, in some respects, they're in a lose-lose situation. They can't control the libraries, etc, and when they load their own, people will whine that it takes a full gig to install MSOffice. What's a company to do? Not bother, that's what.
--John
As for your first con, i dont think you give the mac business unit enough credit. Office for Mac is a streamlined solid program, it blows office XP out of the water and I use both regularly. It's about time we got over the it comes with an MS label so it must be crap train of thought. a select few of their software titles actualy suceed on their own merits, not just based on the aformentioned monopoly.
--aiee
As has been repeated many times here, what Unix really needs is:
...), Microsoft would have to cooperate in the construction of this program in some way.
1] A standard for office file formats
2] A capable standalone import/export program between this format and MS office formats.
The OpenOffice file format looks pretty good to me, but I understand why there could be reluctance among the many other office projects to ditch their ideas (though I think they should anyway).
Having the conversion program be standalone would allow all competing interfaces to the standard file to coexist nicely with each other. My fantasy is that in the final settlement with somebody (US states, EU,
Dara
Excuse me, but you are completely wrong. Perhaps all those Suns and Linux machines you have at your school CS lab don't need an Office suite, but go into industry where real work has to be done and you will find that the lack of Office/Outlook running under Unix is the single most reason why unix workstation sales plummet and CAD design on PCs increases dramatically. Sure there are workarounds, but training requires time, which translates into money. The training costs to get that many people up to speed so that they can use alternate software as well as they already can use Office offsets any cost savings. Remember, most people use a computer because they have to, not because they want to and they are really interested in how things work.
At one time we used to lease over 200 high end Sun and HP workstations. As their leases run out they are all being replaced by dell workstations. Why is this? Well, for one they are cheaper, but primarily its because at this point 99% of the engineering software that used to be unix only now run under win2k, plus they can use Office/Outlook.
Welcome to the real world.
While StarOffice 6.0 Beta still has problems importing certain Word documents (and always will), it seems to export .doc format just fine. I send such documents to folks who only have Word all the time, with no problem.
.doc file was written by SO rather than MS Word? Why would you even bother telling them?
As long as your publisher can read your documents, why will they care whether the
I think SO suffers to a large degree because so many found 5.2 so loathsome. SO (or OpenOffice) 6 is much, much nicer.
Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need this?
I don't know... lots of people decided that they needed sendmail, but it was bloated, unstable, insecure, and needed to run as root.
Microsoft aren't the only people who produce horrible code. They might be the only people who make billions of dollars by doing so, but that's a different matter.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
If you use MS apps on Linux/Unix, you're still using MS apps. You're still voting for MS with dollars. You're still endorsing MS 'extended' protocols and closed file formats.
To me, it's a non-starter. Better to have native apps that can import the files - atleast until MS uses DMCA or UCITA or some other vile thing to make that impossible, too.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Sure, but both require a giant library of stuff to work. Oddly enough the newer lib (Cocoa) is easier to port to random Unix systems because it is more or less NeXTStep. The other lib is more or less 90% of the old MacOS API.
Sure, you can port a Carbon program to a Unix system (give the source code), as long as you implement 90% of MacOS 9 in a user level library. Of corse you could port a Carbon program to VMS, PalmOS, VM/CMS, or the ROM monitor on a SPARC if only you implement 90% of MacOS 9 for it...
Doable, but not easy.
Of corse they do, it makes it sound somehow cool, and also like normal Mac users will never have to learn a single thing about it (and they don't...unless they were the kind of Mac user that fiddled with ResEdit for the fun of it).
Yeah, but not in the sense that it is easy to port to another Unix. I keep struggling for a good analogy, and coming up with nothing. At least nothing stunning. It's a lot like taking a PhotoShop plugin that happens to work on a Windows machine, and saying "look it runs on Windows, it's a Windows program". Sure it is. In theory it could be run without PhotoShop, in practice it's a real pain to recreate enough of PhotoShop to run PhotoShop plugins (or worse yet, actions).
So yeah, with the exception of Classic stuff that runs under OSX are Unix programs, but not always in a useful way!
Dude, you need to get your facts straight.
"Aqua" refers to the GUI layer of the Mac OS API's, i.e. the PDF-based, Display PostScript-derived graphics layer (quartz) and the "look and feel" that goes along with it. Aqua is not an API in and of itself.
There are 2 native Mac OS API's-- Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is a streamlined subset of the classic OS 9 API's designed to work well under preemptive multitasking. Cocoa is the NextStep-derived API's, which are supposed to be the future of the Mac OS.
Developers typically choose one API or the other to write their code in. Carbon prefers C/C++ and makes it easy to port existing OS 9 apps to the new OS. Cocoa uses Objective C or Java as the base language, and generally requires a from-scratch re-write.
Unlike the switch to PPC, Mac OS X does *not* run anything in emulation (aside from the Classic process, which can be switched off entirely if one doesn't want to run classic apps) Carbon is a 100% native Mac OS X API's, and is fully preemptive, fully uses modern memory management, etc. No "old MacOS code" is to be found in Carbon. They implemented many of the same API's, but the code to do so is entirely Mac OS X native.
Office X (like most existing apps) was most likely written as a Carbon app. That means that it has *no* similarlities to OpenStep, and porting it to OpenStep would be practically the same as re-writing it from scratch.
When you say "there aren't any significant OS/X native apps," perhaps you mean that there aren't very many Cocoa apps. This is true, but it's simply wrong to confuse Cocoa with "native." Carbon is *not* a Mac OS 9 emulation layer. Carbon apps are every bit as "native" as Cocoa apps. They happen to call an API set similar to the classic Mac OS API's for the convenience of developers, but the code implementing these API's is entirely new.
Actually, MS don't just make office for Mac to avoid the lawyers, they make it because it makes a heck of a lot of money for them (comparatively little pirating on Macintosh so software generates far more revenue for the size of the user base). Why would MS completely recode Office and spend time making it "Mac-like" if they were just trying to please the lawyers?
Most people don't realise this but as is continuously stressed at product demos, Office:Mac is not a port of Windows and is developed by a completely separate team that is free to implement whichever features they choose. Some code is shared between the team but the product is far from being a straight port and hasn't been since Word 6 turned out to be such a flop.
They are not going to make a Office suite for Linux because they don't right now and they don't feel they have too. If Linux only has 0.24% of the market its easy to economicaly justify that. Plus there are all the other reasons they will not....
Not porting Office to Linux isn't just justifiable, doing otherwise would be economic suicide. There are very few Linux users on the desktop, even fewer of them who really need Office (most Linux users hack code, Office may be used for documentation but business users will either standardise on some other format or provide a convienient Windows box, home users are unlikely to write documentation or would just use another format).
Then, after we've narrowed down the number of users this far, look at how many Linux users would like to pay $500 (estimated US price, I'm Australian) for an Office suite? Linux users are used to getting software for free, it's part of the free software movement (part, not all - freedom is the main focus). These users would most likely either illegally obtain a copy of Office or simply do without it, further harming sales.
Microsoft isn't the only company shying away from developing commercial programs on Linux and for good reason - there is no way it can be economically justified unless the software appeals to the geeks who make up 99% of the Linux user base. Most geek software is written by geeks, for geeks and so is opensource, commercial software is more often made for the average user and so isn't worth porting to Linux.