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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."
Linux already "won" - his goal was to create a Unix-like OS and it became incredibly popular. As far as I am aware he has never shown much interest in getting MS Office for it, or for market share.
Nice try creating animosity where there is none. The summary is full of typos and weasel-words. I'm not huge MS fan but the summary is full of bias in an attempt to turn a mildly interesting story into a flamewar or hatefest.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's a silly question, anyway.
Linus isn't really linux by itself, he just had a critical part to play. The more accurate question would be "is Microsoft losing relevance and marketshare?" to which the answer is yes, and not really a surprise.
It seems silly to conflate this with Microsoft making products for Linux.
This is just an app that's a wrapper for a web app. The same web app you can already run on Desktop Linux.
Besides which, last I checked this wasn't a free webapp and was, in fact, a way for Microsoft to milk more money out of companies that would have otherwise only had to pay Microsoft for each Office license once. Now it's a monthly fee.
The fact that it also works on other OSes is just a "bonus."
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It uses the Linux kernel, therefore it "is Linux".
It is not "GNU/Linux", if you're a Stallmanite; it uses none of the GNU userland. (Although who the hell ever actually said guhnoo-slash-linux anyway?)
The graphics stack is not X11, but that hardly makes it a different entity.
The community does the job of fragmenting the Linux community far better than Microsoft or Apple could ever hope to. That's the downfall.
I hate sigs.
Guess what?
Microsoft didn't release Office for Android.
They released Office Mobile for Office 365.
What you imply is that they released an office suite for Android, when in fact, they merely released an Android client for Office 365 users.
As much as you might care to think one is pretty much the same as the other, you would be wrong. This app is not for editing office documents on your mobile device. It is for Office 365 users to view items synced to their cloud....nothing more. It cannot even access items on your mobile device...