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

Re:Who will use it?

[JBHarris]

I think you may be missing the point. Companies are switching to Linux because it is a viable OS alternative. However, OOo is NOT a viable Office alternative. I have used both OpenOffice and MS-Office each for SEVERAL years, and I have yet to find many features in OOo that I use regularly in MS-Office. Microsoft is loosing ground in the desktop OS category. They want to make sure they at least make SOME money from this explosion of Linux adoption.

Simply, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Brad

Re:Endangers Mutually Supporting Monopolies

[NihilEst]

Overall there is too much danger to Microsoft in this because the Office and Windows monopolies are mutually supporting.

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 :)

OO does a better job with older DOC files

[doublem]

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.