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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.
"Microsoft will fight the total cost of ownership [issue] with a very inexpensive office solution," he said. "I do not think that they will open source Office, but they will make it available to run on Linux desktops."
Who will use this? Sure, I can see Microsoft doing this, as the article says, in order to take a pre-emptive strike against Open Office. But who will use Office for Linux? The current Linux users defintely won't for several reasons: 1.) They hate Micrsoft 2.) They don't want to have to pay for anything, especially something that runs on Linux 3.) They don't want to introduce new vulnerabilities to their system 4.) They already have a solid alternative in Open Office
And, there honestly aren't enough general users using Linux yet, so Microsoft would be lucky to get even a small percentage of Linux users to use Office on Linux. I don't see a user base right now. If Linux were widely accepted (like Apple) on the desktop, then that's another story. But right now it isn't, and therefore there is no user base for this product.
I have a buddy at works who takes pride in the fact that no-one ever notices he's running OpenOffice, not "the real deal".
Admittedy he's a developer and Office is only a smallish fraction of his work, but file compatible software and "workalikes" in general decrease the need for a proper port to Linux. Microsoft will try to push the envelope with new UI bits, which will either be duplicated, or might even be a drawback to the "conservative" Office audience.
A similar process has happened browser-wise. With the web being a larger and larger percentage of what people Do With Computers, having Firefox on any given platform makes it very easy to switch OSes without thinking about it nearly as much.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
(I'm gonna be modded troll for this, I can just feel it.)
Maybe there's no 'real competition' in 'that segment' because the need is pretty much filled? Can you name something that you wanted to do to a document that you couldn't do in Office Or OpenOffice.org?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Bleh. We already have a decent standards that'll handle 99.99% of word processing documents just fine: HTML/JPG tarballs. Viewability on any browser post-extraction is a definite advantage. That's the standard that should be adopted worldwide for WP documents.
Other data like spreadsheets? Much as it pains me to do so, I'd go for MS's XML solution (maybe compressed after creation) over ODF. At least it should be readable in any text editor, whereas ODF probably isn't. Granted, Office-generated XML will probably be horribly bloated and obfuscated, but it's actually still a nice idea.
-b.
This was what the original DoJ anti-trust effort against MSFT, if you'll recall, attempted to accomplish: a divestiture of MSFT's OS and applications divisions. It failed. We still have the three-headed Hydra whose left hand (Windows OS) supports it's right hand (Office and similar apps).
We are now seeing the oligopoly behaving like an oligopoly does: less choice, fewer options. Once upon a time, MSFT did release a Word for Mac and a Word for OS/2; but that was before Windows had its death grip on the desktop market. Now MSFT sees no need -- until ODF, there was no competition. Now there is. This ought to be interesting :)
Founding member: He-Man Windoze Hater Club
What about SharePoint?
Any good collaborative, real-time tools out there being developed on the Open Source front?
You might want to mod me as troll, mods, but that's because I'm right and it angers you.
SharePoint's only serious competitor, Groove, was acuired by MicroSoft and Lotus Notes doesn't want to create 'real' clients for Linux or Mac. Sure, you can install them, but they suck.
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My wife's comments, in order, in about 20 seconds after she loaded her word created document and excel created spreadsheets:
;) )
"It's not exactly like MS Office - I hate it"
"I need my macros - this is useless without my macros"
"How do I add a VB script to this spreadsheet? I need them for my pivot tables to get the right information from the database. How do I access my Access database?"
After struggling with alternates for all of the above, there was really one sticking point - Access. I'm a fair DB guy, and have even had to use MS's other junky database, MS-SQL (yes, I am biased), but I prefer Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres to anything MS makes (the latter mostly because they're free). Nothing worked enough like Access to appease her - I guess once you're hooked on crap, there's nothing like it. I gave up and dropped $400 on an OEM MS Office and a new hard drive. Anyhow, I learned my lesson - it's bad enough that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but it's twice as bad with an old wife (she's a year my senior - actually 2 for about another week - I can call her that
This ODF-Viewer doesn't let you edit the ODF: http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/OOSimpleViewer.ht ml
VIEWERS don't let you edit the files, EDITORS do allow that.
Interestingly enough, i found several free (as in beer) PDF-Editors.
Crossover Office (commercial WINE) works well enough for Office for most people. The list of what doesn't work is getting smaller all the time. I use it for the rare cases where OOo doesn't. I also have VMWare for the cases where WINE is just not good enough yet.
It's been my experience that Open Office tends to do a better job parsing older DOC files than the latest and greatest Word.
For example, I was working at a company that did a massive upgrade from Office 95 to Office 2000. Most the documents were Insurance and Securities courses, some close to 700 pages in length, complete with complex formatting and layout.
The process of reformatting the documents was long and painful, until I started using the then Beta Open Office to convert the documents to the newest Office format.
While some fiddling was still necessary, most of the tables and floating text boxes came through just fine. The first sample course I did required an hour of reformatting after my conversion, where it has needed over six hours of editing if Word 2000 was used straight from the Word 95 document.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
...would probably be some kind of "Windows for Linux" which will run inside a VM in a running instance of Linux. That way MS will still be able to sell you the "Windows for Linux" plus the "Office for Windows for Linux". They'll likely give the VM layer away for free, however, since that precedent for free VMs has already been established.
Word is by far the most horrible, painful software I ever used in my life.
You don't use it, you fight against it.
Believe me, even for your mom, it is actually easier to use LaTeX than Word.
factor 966971: 966971
Microsoft wouldn't port MS-Office to Linux just because it's profitable. Microsoft attempts to destroy anything that might be a threat to their MS-Windows / MS-Office hegemony, their only real source of income. MS-Exchange sells mostly because MS-Outlook is bundled with their other products, and because it fits into the MS-Windows world.
Microsoft doesn't cooperate with anything or anybody that might harm their desktop dominance, because that's the only thing keeping them alive right now. There's nothing profitable about Microsoft that isn't tied directly to MS-Windows. With Vista so long delayed, they haven't had a recent upgrade cycle to pump a lot of money out of other corporations. They certainly won't release a version of MS-Office for Linux until Vista is as widely deployed as XP is now.
Make no mistake. Microsoft is not interested in anything that doesn't push MS-Windows on the desktop. Even MS-Office for the Mac is a very low priority, there mostly because of past deals with Apple, and because they don't see Apple as a threat on the desktop yet.
Linux is a different matter. Linux isn't a threat yet, either, but Microsoft sees how it might be. All it takes is a few high-profile deployments of Linux / Open Office / Firefox on the desktop, and Linux might suddenly displace MS-Windows during Microsoft's next forced-march upgrade cycle, when OEMs no longer bundle XP, and suddenly everyone has to upgrade because the new version of MS-Office doesn't work properly on XP.
It's likely this won't happen. But it might. And so Microsoft is probably more frightened of Linux than they are of Mac OS X.
At least, that's how I understand the situation, based on years of watching Microsoft deal with potential threats to their OS stanglehold.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I get it; self supporting monopoly etc. etc., hegemony requires both office and Windows. But what about all this MS Live stuff they're doing. They could port the .NET framework (or something like it) to Linux, thereby embracing and extending Linux itself. Binaries only, evade the GPL, and then release "Office Live" for the .NET Framework, which of course comes with IE. Discount it even a little bit. Now change your pricing structure a tiny bit: i.e. Windows includes the .NET framework free, but the one for Linux costs $100 at BestBuy + $15/year for updates.
.NET framework on Linux. Its W0L: Windows on Linux.
.NET framework only works well with some odd kernel revision, and after a year or so, ship a MS drop in replacement kernel that works wonderfully with .NET, but breaks Samba, Apache, NetFilter, Firefox and OO something fierce; but includes a Windows Server CAL and an Exchange CAL for $150 more. Voila: Linux problem solved.
Now: include AOL (profit sharing with Time Warner of course), WMP, MSN Toolbar, MSN sign up links, ads for Microsoft Mice and keyboards... all only for the
Now: ensure that the Linux
(Of course there would be considerable challenges in all of this, but they're well funded, and smarter than we usually give them credit for.)
Kyle Hodgson Systems Geek
OpenOffice has made real progress. As a long-time user, I've watched it go from "totally sucks" to "almost works" to "works, but is irritating at times". Right now, it works mechanically, but has more sharp edges than Office. Compare, say, OpenOffice word completion with Microsoft Word. OpenOffice will try to do the same dumb thing twice. Microsoft Word will stop fighting you after the first time.
And, let's face it, OpenOffice help information needs help. If you ask for help on something, you often either can't find it, get info about the wrong thing, or get info which doesn't tell you exactly where to find something in the menu system. It's little stuff like that which affects user likability.
All these things are fixable, but they're not the kind of problems that get fixed via Bugzilla complaints. The open source process isn't good at fixing usability issues. It takes things like videotaping users struggling with a program to get these kinds of problems fixed.
Usability testing is simple enough. You make up some tasks, like "Write a letter on company letterhead, then print it and its envelope". You videotape a few people doing this, with a system that records both the screen and the user's face and voice. You watch the videos (this is the time-consuming part) and note all the places where the user got stuck, had to undo something, or lost time. Those are your usability bugs. The goal is a seamless user experience, or "flow".
It would be useful to have video like that on SourceForge or YouTube. It's boring, but it would give more developers a sense of what usability is really about.
If I were at Micro$oft, I'd look at it like this...
2 options. Either A) port office, or B) don't port office. If office were ported, then they'd likely make quite a bit of cash on sales from it. However, file format support is, to my understanding, one of the major reasons businesses don't leave windoze platform. Office on linux could cause more users to make the big switch. Microsoft wouldn't like that. They'd still be making money from office sales, but why lose the income from the OS itself as well? (Though it's still rarely an option to buy a given model of computer without xp installed if it comes from any of the major OEMs). Worse yet (for M$ at least), users who switchover would be exposed to a buffet of FOSS equivilents to countless proprietary software products. A good number of users would probably decide to save themselves more money by using openoffice instead, after having been exposed to it (as it seems to come standard on most the major distro's now, or at least is easy to get).
If they follow option B, and don't port it, they miss out only on the market share currently held by the *nix variants. From the business point of view, in the long run, option B seems safer.
Fortunately, WINE and its variants are already very compatible with the staple software most people rely on, and are progressing at an impressive rate. So if M$ doesn't port it themselves, in the end anyone with an x86 can still likely run it virtually flawlessly. At this rate, in a year or two if M$ ported it, it wouldn't matter anymore. Sure, it'd be 'officially' supported, but unless they also ported to different processor architectures, I don't see it having much of an effect. (And I'm sure the last thing M$ wants is people to start buying pc's with anything but x86's or x86_64's in them).