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.

Comments

Office X is out

[DuckWing]

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.

Nowhere near easy to port

[miahrogers]

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.

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 .NET implementations.

Why *I* believe MS doesn't want MSOffice on Linux

[jcwren]

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

Maybe, but standard office file formats would do

[dara]

As has been repeated many times here, what Unix really needs is:

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, ...), Microsoft would have to cooperate in the construction of this program in some way.

Dara

Re:An analytical look at Office for UNIX

[cperciva]

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.

the question is not 'why not?' but 'why?'

[fanatic]

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.

Re:Not Unix?

[stripes]

Carbon Applications are every bit as Unix as Cocoa

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.

I think this confusion is Apple's fault. They use terminology like a Terminal window "letting you talking directly to the Unix kernel". This is crap, the shell is just another program. They mystify Unix and make it sound harder than it really is.

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).

In short, unless it is running in the classic environment (they all run as one application), it is a Unix Application

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!