With Microsoft Office on Android, Has Linus Torvalds Won?

sfcrazy writes "The father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, once said, 'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' Microsoft yesterday released one of its cash cows, Microsoft Office, for Android. Since Microsoft has a very vague idea of what users want and is suffering from lock-in, the app is just an Android front end of Office 365 and is accessible only by the paid users. There are already quite a lot of office suites available on Android including Office Pro, QuickOffice and KingSoft, so Microsoft will have to struggle there. Still it's a Microsoft core application coming to Linux. So, it looks like Linus has won."

Comments

Re:I don't know, has he?

[Lunix Nutcase]

If they are losing relevance than why would this even warrant a story? How would having even more people using Office be akin to losing relevance? It seems it would be the opposite.

Re:I don't know, has he?

[lgw]

There are many perfectly serviceable competitors for PowerPoint and Excel, both free and proprietary.

People who live and die by the PowerPoint sales presentation don't agree. I can't stand slideware myself, so I don't have a strong opinion, but people I know who make and show presentations all day (and have good reasons to use non-MS products) say there's just no comparison. SmartArt automation is a big part of it, I'm guessing.

Similarly, unless you just need a spreadsheet calculator, I haven't seen anything that stands with Excel - certainly the online spreadsheets like the Google Docs one don't come anywhere close. I use Excel as my drawing program (if you make the cells square, it's great for the kind of drawing you do on graph paper), which nothing else seems good at, but mostly there's this whole culture of "spreadsheet programmers" who only know Excel/VBA (seriously, no other languages or training, but spend days on VBA programs).