Stuart Cohen Predicts Office for Linux

wysiwia writes "Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL, said during an interview with vnunet.com at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco that it's 'inevitable' that Microsoft will release a version of Office to run on Linux within the 'next couple of years'. But when one reads the OSDL survey about the 'Top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption' this 'next couple of years' might mean quite a long time. This leads to the question, has Stuart Cohen read his own survey and how does he overcome these inhibitors so MS really will think about MSOffice for Linux." I think the bigger question is 'In reality, how likely is Office for Linux?' I'm not sure that I agree with his assumption.

Comments

Deja Vu...

[lseltzer]

This stupid idea gets predicted every few years. Check this one out from early 2000, and I remember earlier ones. It makes sense to Linux-Heads, but from Microsoft's standpoint it's a 100% loser, and it would require a great deal of effort for probably trivial revenues.

Re:Who will use it?

[Red Flayer]

Who will use this?

Companies who are not deploying Linux as of now because of the costs of retraining users to use an office suite other then MS Office, and the problems with imperfect interoperability with MS Office docs in other office suites.

My company has a significant number of daily-use files and periodic procedures that would be expensive to rebuild using a new office suite -- these are patched-together items that have evolved over many years.

Would it theoretically be better to build new from scratch using OO or some other suite? Sure. Can we afford the down-time and development costs required to do so? No.

This would, however, enable us to deploy Linux on our desktops without losing too much functionality, which would (hopefully) save us a ton of cash on the support and licensing sides.

Re:Office on linux? Not natively.

[b0s0z0ku]

Exactly. That's also the reason why there will never be a port to Mac OSX either.

The next OS X Office release will be crippled as compared to the Vista version. No VB macros for one, which will break support for a lot of specialized documents that companies may now have.

-b.

Re:less and less relevant

[brunascle]

no-one ever notices he's running OpenOffice, not "the real deal".

that's certainly not always the case. i had a major project senior year of college. we collaborated on a presentation in PPT. the first guy worked on his stuff, sent the .ppt to me, i added my stuff and sent it to the next guy.

at the time, i was using linux as my desktop, and added my part in OpenOffice. unfortunately, the first guy added animations to each slide which apparently werent handled in OO. since the only one who had seen it with the animations was the first guy, we didnt catch the problem until minutes before the presentation.

PDF is editable

[Alphager]

The standard is open, published and free for everybody to implement. There are just no good free tools, that's all.

Re:More likely

[megabyte405]

Well, I'm not sure about the other features (though they can be written, probably most easily as plugins), but AbiWord definitely has mathematical equation editing that works - it's MathML and LaTeX based, and basically surpasses all other word processors in this account for those with experience in math markup (no new language to learn!).

Check it out at www.abisource.com (and stop back in a few months for our real-time collaborative editing plugin, debuting with version 2.6.0 )

--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/

might be true, but i guess not from Microsoft.

[Spliffster]

does any one remeber IE (AFAIK IE 4) for unix ? it never worked propperly (buggy) was slow as hell and even incompatible with windows and mac version (read no activex, no VB, different front sizes, etc.). Microsoft didn't support it fro long ...

MS Office is another beast, it is not "just" a web browser (ok, ok, IE is also not just a web browser but still, office does a lot more and is tightly integrated in their OS).

OTOH, wine IE6/5.5/5 works well from my own experience (altough it's a bit slower than native on w32 it is compatible with the windows equivalent as long as you rip the font files from your ... aehm ... old windows you have there). And I read that crossover office (altough not on the latest and greates version) shall work well on linx and OSX.

so from my own experience, eighter hell freezes over or some other company will provide a usable ms office support on linux but certainly not microsoft.

Cheers,
-S

Re:More likely

[level_headed_midwest]

OpenOffice has an absolutely excellent equation editing function- far, far better than Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 that is used in Office. You can use a palette a la MSEE 3 or better yet, just type the numbers and use brackets for grouping, underscores for subscripting, and %GREEKCHARACTERS. It's very easy to do and one of the big features that OO has over MS Office in my mind.

Missing the obvious

[aussersterne]

For three years I've already run MS Office 2002 on Fedora Core. It works perfectly, insert CD-ROM, launch "Setup," click "Next" all the way through, then the first time you run it complete the product activation, etc. It starts faster than OpenOffice.org, is more stable, and it's absolutely transparently like any other Linux application.

I've also run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, and FrameMaker for the same period of time.

Wine really is that good now, people, if you configure it well, *or* if you go to Codeweavers.com and buy Crossover Office for well under $100. No, I don't work for them, nor do I work for the Wine project, I'm just still shocked at how people treat Windows compatibility like it's such an issue here--the posts that talk about it as if Microsoft loses the farm the moment Office runs on Linux... well, it has now for years. I wrote two books and my thesis on it, in Linux.

Same thing with Photoshop, I'm always seeing all these posts about how Linux desperately Lacks a Photoshop and GIMP isn't there yet... Well, install @#($* Photoshop in Linux and be done with it.

I was a nonbeliever when I used to try to configure Wine myself (though I did get Office 97 to run under it, after lots of self-configuration), but once I finally broke down and gave Crossover Office a start, I'm recommended it to all my family and friends. I know it sounds like a commercial, but Office for Linux is such a solved problem. And I know people don't like commercial software, but Codeweavers is an OSS service company in most ways: their product is simply a reworked version of an OSS project, and they contribute code back regularly.

But if Office for Linux came out tomorrow, I wouldn't buy it. I already have Office 2002 for Windows running flawlessly on my FC5 desktop. Why would I shell out again?

Re:The VBA Macros and VB interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Office 2007 have a VBA based on .Net?

Nope, Office 2007 is still using the legacy VBA engine.