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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.
Office for MacOS X doesn't use X11, it uses the native OS X GUI. IIRC they are using Carbon, a transitional API from older MacOS's to OS X.
Under OS X, the GUI is not an X server. It's a lot more advanced than X, which has its pros and cons.
For example, it supports transparency natively, and z-coordinates. But it isn't network-transparent out of the box.
In any case, yes, you could to Office on *nix if you were to port Cocoa or Carbon to the platform of choice, but i don't see Apple doing that anytime soon.
IE for Solaris is based on a partial port of win32 to solaris--with this you could theoretically port office for win32 to Solaris and therefore *nix.
Anyway, don't confuse OS X with a Real Unix with Real X Windows. Support for X on OSX is a third-party effort at best.
Office v.X is what is called a "Carbon" app. It uses a subset of the old Mac APIs to work on OS X. No such API exists on any unix, so it would require rewriting the entire GUI aspect of the program to run on another UNIX.
This was Apple's way of making it easy to port apps from the "old" MacOS to OS X. You just have to make sure you are not using the parts of the old APIs that are "naughty" under OS X (directly access hardware, etc.) and you are good to go.
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
Its about the document format. Microsoft controls the future of what is called .doc file and what isn't. Same with .xls spreadsheets. Any desktop will need robust interaction and access to the future of those file formats.
The weak link in Microsoft accomplishing an Office on Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD, unfortunately, is XFree86. Apple gets around this with Aqua/Quartz and video-card integration (nVidia and ATI).
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
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
- 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?
- No freedom. This is a step in the wrong direction for those of us who
prefer to use 'cvs update' instead of service packs to update our systems.
- Monopoly leveraging. Microsoft will undoubtedly engineer their
.Net
"features" into new versions of Office. Don't be surprised if you, as a
UNIX user, will need a Passport account just to run Word.
- Monopoly extension. Why would anyone work on improving Koffice,
StarOffice, or LaTeX if MS Office exists on the UNIX platform? The
competitors would start out at a huge disadvantage and know there's no
place in the market for them.
Now, on the plus side:- User friendliness. MS Office provides a seamless transition for
lusers who have grown up with Windows and don't know anything else.
- World domination. Anything that helps us replace inferior desktop OSs is a good thing,
evolution-wise and principle-wise.
- Hackability. UNIX is a far superior platform for hackers because of
the wide array of debugging tools available, so it will make reverse
engineers' jobs easier.
It is obvious that the cons outweigh the pros here by sheer numbers. But given the recent strides made by the Koffice team, it will only be a matter of time before their product is superior to MS Office in every respect.-Uncle
While Word for Linux wouldn't be a bad thing for the Linux community, I don't think it's the hottest thing needed. There's a slew of word processing programs for Linux, several of which can handle .doc pretty well. Sure, John Q. Public might be more likely to use Linux if he could use Word itself... But I digress.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Although internally OS X is a UNIX, the GUI toolkit that it uses, Cocoa is not X11, and has nothing to do with it. Most of the low-level jobs are done using PostScript, and the high-level APIs are in Objective C.
Because of that, Cocoa is even further from Linux than native Windows APIs. The closest thing to Cocoa on Linux is Qt, but they still have such substancial differences that easy porting is not an option.
Microsoft does not own a nice chunk of Apple. They bought $150k worth of non-voting stock a few years back. $150k, contrary to what many people think, is just a drop in the bucket to Apple. Apple is actually a multi-billion dollar company.
MS will continue to make a Office suite for MacOS because if they don't it will be another prime example of how, as a monopoly, they can control the fate of other companies.
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....
Cocoa which is the old NEXT api upgraded and tweeked to MacOSX. It can be used from object C and java.
Apple wasn't getting super good feedback from developers about porting all there apps to Cocoa so apple under pressure released....
The Carbon api, which is a bit like the old mac os (I think like 80-90% the same). This allowed companies to rewrite existing apps for OS-X easily.
These are the 2 native api layers for OSx. Older apps (mac os 7-8-9) still run in a compatability mode.
Oreilly has an article on Carbon/Cocoa that is quite good.
Microsoft is using Carbon for there port..So not as super easy to port.. But then again they just might not want to port it....
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 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.
One of OS X's gifts to the world, however, is the end of the reign X Window on UNIX. The GUI environment under OS X is Aqua. Anyone writing for the Mac writes their GUI as an Aqua GUI (Java apps are Aqua). You cannot easily port an Aqua app to the X Window System.
There's one very strong reason why many people would like to see Office for Linux (or any other free UNIX) -- because they want to move away from Windows, but Office is "standard" everywhere.
I work with several publishers who won't accept manuscripts in anything but Word, which means that if you want to write or edit for those companies -- even if you're working on their Linux books -- you have to bow down to Office.
There are a lot of people who HATE Windows but love Office. Honestly, StarOffice et al. haven't caught up to Word's revision features. I wish they would, and soon, but until then there are a lot of businesses that would benefit enormously from being able to run Office on Linux or *BSD because the only apps they need are mail, browser and Word and Excel. (And maybe Access...) Frankly, I'd rather write in Vim any day, but just try to convince a large publisher to accept chapters in plain text, LaTeX or DocBook. And I'm not talking about O'Reilly.
StarOffice is just fine for typing a quick letter or whatever, but its revision control isn't up to snuff and it still has trouble converting Word docs. I'm no champion of Microsoft or their products, but if Microsoft were to port Office to Linux I strongly believe you'd see a surge in Linux on the desktop -- precisely why they won't do it. Why don't you see tons of Macs? Damned expensive hardware, that's why. Commodity PCs + Free OS + Office == Happy Businesses.
I really don't know anyone who uses Linux to be "trendy" though I know a lot of people who find the migration difficult if they try to replicate the Windows experience under Linux.
In the near future, we will see many, many more 'main stream' applications such as Adobe's prestigious family of design applications, Macromedia's design, multimedia and production applications, etc. running 'natively' on OS X. Don't look for any of these applications to be ported to UNIX. Developing for OS X is absolutely nothing like developing for UNIX, take it from a developer.
For example, a carbon applications is still based on the same MacOS APIs that have existed in the past - with a few omissions and a few additions, of course. The point of Carbon, though, is to make porting existing MacOS applications as easy as possible. Cocoa, on the other hand, is very different and is a totally new creature, and one that is proprietary, I'm afraid. I don't think we will see a Cocoa compatability layer for Linux - ever. These OS X applications are not based on the FreeBSD/OpenBSD foundation of OS X, it is the OS itself that is based on these foundations, not the applications that run on top of the OS.
A valid analogy might be the fact that in a large part, Windows NT was initially based in a large part on VMS, if I recall - maybe not the actual code, but I have heard varying reports of that as well. Of course, no application that runs on NT will run on VMS (without significant recoding). This is because the foundation of these OS's is less important than the APIs they are written against.
Bottom line here is that OS X is far more than a foundation of FreeBSD/OpenBSD with a pretty window manager. For more info, check out Apple's site for developers: click here. You'll find info on Darwin (the FreeBSD/OpenBSD layer), Cocoa, Carbon, how the various layers interact, what depends on what, etc. Enjoy!
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.
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
Most UNIX-like systems use an X11 server to draw graphics on the screen. MacOS X does not use X11; instead it uses Quartz, a Display PDF server, derived from NeXT's Display PostScript server. (The GNUstep project is working on a DPS/Quartz server running on top of X11.)
X11 and Quartz only provide basic drawing capabilities. They don't provide widgets such as menus, toolbars, scrollbars, etc. So a widget toolkit API is layered on top of the drawing functionality. In X11, common widget sets are KDE/Qt, GNOME/GTK, and Xt/Motif. Most of these APIs try to shield the programmer from having to access any of the low-level rendering calls. There are versions of Qt that can run without X11 -- the front end and back end are completely de-coupled.
MacOS X provides 2 different APIs for GUIs: Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa is basically the NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP API adapted for use within MacOS. It contains most of the old NeXT stuff, plus some functionality from MacOS 9. It is accessed via Objective-C. (The GNUstep folks are attempting to emulate most of Cocoa.) Carbon is basically the old MacOS 9 API in C adapted to use Quartz and the other lower-level functionality of MacOS X.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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!
You mean _fortunately_ it's only for Solaris and HP-UX.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Cocoa is NeXTStep, right down to things being named NSfoo. Well, it is NeXTStep, plus some extra development, but not a ton of extra stuff (I guess they were busy doing other things).
So something that could run NeXTStep apps could run a subset of Cocoa apps. More importantly if the thing that ran NeXTStep apps were extended to do the extra things (like sheets, and adding "display PDF" (not too hard given Display PostScript)) it could probably run a lot of Cocoa stuff...
Where could we find something like that? Maybe GNUStep? I mean they have been working on it for a long time...
P.S. X Windows isn't a GUI. It's a rendering engine, and a method to get raw user input. Gtk and Qt are more like GUIs (technically they are just GUI toolkits, a big paper document called a User Interface guide is a real important part of the GUI...), oh I think I got off track. Anyway X is a base to build GUIs on, and one could imitate the OSX GUI (more or less -- Alpha transparency between the new GUIs apps an other apps could be a pain).
In fact people have been working on it for a while, go look at GNUStep, it's not Cocoa, but it's what Cocoa was before Apple bought it, and doing the rest is doable. Not a trivial afternoon's work, but not a decade long effort either.
And while you may, you don't seem to have a great handle on X11...not that it is an easy thing to understand, or all that frequently a useful thing to understand...
But you managed to be wrong on every point.
Is it an Application? Yes.
Does it run native on MacOSX? Yes.
well, almost.
On that you are absolutely right.
Is MacOSX a Unix OS? Yes.
Somewhat.
MacOSX is based on a BSD/Mach Kernel. But that doesnt make it Unix. The Unix compatibility is more of a one-way street than anything else. Lemme hit a few more of your points, and I'll explain:
Carbon Applications are every bit as Unix as Cocoa.
True, but not in the way you meant. Cocoa has _NOTHING_ to do with Unix, and neither does carbon.
Carbon is not some thin wrapper Apple devised to help developers port.
somewhat true. Carbon is almost the entire MacOS toolbox, as its been since the begining. Apple took the existing toolbox, weeded out the APIs that wouldnt work under OSX (the ones with direct hardware access, for example) and added a few new oens, and called that carbon. Its a completely integrated API set for MacOSX, not just a wrapper.
This aided in porting current applications to MAcOSX without having to do a major re-write.
In fact some aspects of Cocoa, under the OO level, are implemented using Carbon API calls.
wrong. Cocoa was pretty much done LONG before the idea of carbon came around. originally, there was going to be a "classic" compatibility layer, much like there is now, and then from there developers would have to completrely re-write their applications in objective-c or java for cocoa (yellow box, as it was known then). After much developer discontent, they decided to add carbon, which sits NEXT to cocoa, not underneath it. In fact, with MacOSX server 1, there was no carbon compatibility layer, or a classic layer for that matter. just BSD and yellow-box.
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.
I agree, it could be taken as confusing. but with terminal programs, you can simply port most *nix applications and have them run in the terminal without a problem.
The problem only arises if you try to use a GUI, under which case you would have to use quartz...
which has _NOTHING_ to do with x11 or gnome or kde or anything like that.
In short, unless it is running in the classic environment (they all run as one application), it is a Unix Application.
BZZZZZZT.
nope.
its a Unix application as much as OfficeXP is a VAX/XMS application (NT having some of its roots in VMS, Win32 having its roots in NT)
Now, getting to what I was saying earlier, Unix compatibility ios a one-way street with MacOSX. it is based on a Mach/BSD kernel, and can run a good deal of bsd/unix programs with a simple re-compile or some minor code tweaking....
But theres a lot more to OSX then the BSD layer.
On top of that, is the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, which run on top of the BSD layer. THESE are what the native applications are written to, the higher-level APIs. and then there is the Quartz graphics layer, which is the GUI for OSX.
Any Native MacOSX application, therefore, isnt written to the BSD layer, but to the cocoa and carbon layer that sits atop it.
Apple could port (with significant effort, no doubt) the upper layers of MacOSX to run on the NT kernel, but that wouldnt make the applications any more Win32 then it would make them BSD or VAX for that matter.
this is evolution, and its only working one way.
Humans arent gonna evolve into apes (although its arguable that a fair amount have the brain capacity of apes....), and in somewhat the same way, OSX applications arent gonna evolve into Unix applications.
they can be re-written, but not simply evolve into them.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
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.
It's plum ironic that you read all about Linux, BSD, Solaris, hacking, personal freedoms, and all other sorts of stuff on Slashdot, and yet no one ever seems to be able to get it right, or care to try very hard, when it comes to the Mac OS or Mac OS X. Even the initial post didn't seem to me to have looked very hard to see if there IS a Mac OS X version of Office.
I wrote the MacNN article which sparked this thread last year, and saw a complete and total lack of understanding in most of the following posts. The tone of the followups expressed a lack of understanding on Apple's part for using BSD and not Linux - that Apple is not savvy enough to be in business, etc. This thread has reinforced that most dotters don't really understand what Mac OS X IS.
-++-
Mac OS X is NOT Unix. Mac OS X is NOT *NIX, or Linux. The architecture of Mac OS X is focused on leveraging the Mach kernel to provide services, do VM, handle threads, and more. Then, the tools on top of that are crafted to the Mach kernel, such as all applications being a Mach thread, and networking through BSD sockets. There is no compatibility layer which speaks Mach, there is only Mach.
Perhaps the work to change this would not revolutionize the field of Computer Science, but there is no true reason for Apple to switch, and having application *NIX personalities is a feature almost no "Mac" user would ever care about.
Quartz is not X11. X11 is a protocol, Quartz is an API. The better analogy would be Quartz and KDE - both of which feed a display engine, and provide widgets and graphical tools. Without getting into a side by side comparison, which you choose is going to be a matter of choice as to which you like better.
But, Microsoft worked hard to leverage the Quartz API for many of the features in Office - graph generation being the primary target, so a good amount of work would have to be done to reengineer major parts of the display engine just to get around these sections.
Consider further, if you will, how hard it has proven to be for most programming firms to take a Win32 application to the Mac using the Mac Toolbox (aka Classic) or even Carbon, much less fine-tuning it's graphics for the platform. The more impressive quick translation applications for Mac OS X have been written in Cocoa, the framework that has evolved from the NextSTEP/OPENSTEP frameworks/APIs, and Cocoa isn't even close to being link Carbon.
With the Mac Office codebase written in Carbon/Classic, it would take quite a while for any porting to take place, and in such time, I am confidant a newer version of Office would have already been released...
-++-
I'm not saying Slashdot should become, overnight, more Mac OS X conscious, but really...no one would spare the whip on someone who said Linux and Windows were the same since they are both operating systems...
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.
What is all this jazz about you can't do this or that, say Windows X, under OS X?
:-)
There's an explantion of how to set up mod_ssl in PDF, installing links (the browser), even an OS X port of zork from Unix, and a Solution Guide written for the novice for installing XFree86 (the X Window Server for OS X), fink, WindowMaker and GIMP, among other things, at http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/index.html This "home page" is really a download site and has other items and belongs to the guy who does MacOSXHints at http://www.macoshints.com/. They speak a little Unix and Linux there in the forums. What _is_ this problem about X Windows on a Macintosh running OSX?
Mac people have been putting up Linux and FreeBSD web sites for years. We talk a little *nix ourselves, we just prefer the colorful flavored brand and like having the best of all *nix worlds in one.
Why fool around with Office for Unix? Run it on a Mac. Exchange files in business easily. Run Windows 98, 2k, or XP under VPI 5.0 (OS X version). Boot into suse or redhat, pick your flavor, all on one drive. Use all the "classic" software like Photoshop 6 or Quark Express while running Classic under OSX, both coming to OS X in carbon or cocoa form in 2002. Let's see, there's Adobe Illustrator X and Macromedia's Freehand 10, there's a complete business suite for small business in OS9 or OSX, and students may be interested to know that the two top math apps used in grad schools are available in X, along with a host of biological science and chemistry apps. Many of the BeOS folks are moving back to X.
Sales pitch? You betcha Red Ryder. I used to do Unix, then Linux, and now I do it all with a base of OS X with built in Apache and a host of *nix shipping with the user version of X, not to mention a Developer's Toolkit tossed in with everything from the basics (like a free compiler) to advanced scripting support with AppleScript Studio, a free download if you sign up for Apple Developer Connection. Cost: free. http://www.apple.com/macosx/
Did I mention that Darwin is open source, a derivative of FreeBSD, and is the heart of Mac OS X?
Hey dudes, this is where *nix for the desktop is headed, jump on board.
(duh....what a rant).......
I don't need my friend to tell me this.
Essentially, you can look for Office / Linux the day Democrats are back in the white house, and Microsoft is split into OS and Application companies. Until then, you will have to download Star Office with the rest of the world.