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.

Re:More likely

(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?

Re:More likely

Accurate legal-style wordcount? Mathematical equations editing that doesn't crash or slow to a crawl? Sane bibliography/reference management without a stupid payware addon? Page layout that doesn't randomly change according to your printer drivers (okay, that's mostly only microcrap office).

Yes, archive files for 50 years

With MS Office, the format changes on a regular basis. There are already doc format files which are almost impossible to read, even on Windows. Governments, multinationals may want data to remain readable for the forseeable future, you don't get that unless you are using a standardised document format.

Mmmm, also switch platforms. With doc, you are locked into a monopoly, which is frankly a dumb place to put yourself given an easy alternative.

 

OO does a better job with older DOC files

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.

Re:More likely

Yes, but ODFs will allow editing, unlike native PDFs

Who will use it?

"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.

Re:Who will use it?

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:Who will use it?

>>> Who will use this?

One of the primary arguments by the PHB's in my company against Linux on the desktop is Microsoft Office. Do not pretend it isn't a big deal.

Re:Who will use it?

Who will use this?

Business users. If migrating the business desktop to Linux gains enough traction MS will have to do it to keep at least some revenue stream from those customers. The other incentive that's been growing lately is government desktops. Unlike Apple users, individual Linux users are not likely to pay for MSOffice - but an IT department is a different kettle of fish.

Re:Who will use it?

Who will use this?

I would. In a heartbeat. And the small office that I am setting up for a client this week, they'd use it too. In fact, I'd put them all on Linux today if I could assure my client he could easily get temps and office workers who wouldn't have problems (genuine and imagined) with OO, but I can't.

These people aren't fourteen years old, they don't "hate Microsoft," they just have a job to do and want to do it with reliable and familiar tools. Linux works just fine on the desktop, and I'm happy to recommend it and install it, but outside of geek-dom no one cares about the OS. It's all about the applications.

Microsoft releasing Office for Linux is the greatest thing that could happen to Linux. That's why I am skeptical they will do it...

less and less relevant

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.

Just go buy Windows Media Player for Linux...

...and you'll know how serious any Microsoft announcement about software for Linux is.

3 or 4 years ago, /. had the announcement of WMP for Linux (which I, correctly I believe, posited that it was both vaporware and a strategic announcement to get content providers away from RealPlayer, then the only DRM system that officially supported Linux).

This one makes even less sense, as there's no target, no commercial enterprise that has a potential market for office for Linux (OO is free and if OO didn't come out, the Gnome office suite would probably have gotten more development and attention). Nobody has the potential in the Office suite to use Linux as a means of saying "we're better than Microsoft" to any content providers providing proprietary material.

So unless its going to be part of a larger "patent scare" program Microsoft might pull (they've been holding THAT trump card on Office apps for years), I don't see the point.

And if there's no point, there's no truth to it. Nothing Microsoft does it does without a specific competitor in mind, and there really is no competitor here.

economic question

Why would you first install a free OS to later add a paying Office application ? my answer would be : only in a very small number of cases. So potential sales for this MSOffice4Linux are small ... not attractive for MS.

Endangers Mutually Supporting Monopolies

MS would only do this is there was a critical mass of linux desktops. Overall there is too much danger to Microsoft in this because the Office and Windows monopolies are mutually supporting. There was a related story on this in 2004 IBM Wants to Port Office to Linux [slashdot.org].

Here is a cut and paste from my comment [slashdot.org] then:

Can MS-Office be ported to Linux technically? I would say yes, because they were able to make a Mac OS X port, which has BSD-Unix underpinnings. Pretty much anything than can be done on BSD can be done on Linux. So no great feat of technology would be involved on getting MS-Office ported to Linux.

Now lets talk about why MS would or would not want to do this. If enough of a market existed (read: Corporate customers clamoring for a native Linux port), MS might have an opportunity to retain those customers (and maybe get a few new customers) and make some money doing it. So there is an opportunity for them there in the office suite market. The danger is this: MS-Office & MS-Windows are mutually supporting monopolies in the corporate world. . As long as Office effectively requires Windows, every corporate desktop sold with Office almost guarantees an accompanying windows license. So double the revenue for M$. A native Linux version of MS-Office would undermine Windows. Once Windows is undermined, then Office itself might be jeopardized because they are mutually supporting.

A native Linux port of MS-Office is just too much of a threat to the MS monopoly structure. MS knows this, so such a port will never see the light of day.

Re:Endangers Mutually Supporting Monopolies

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 :)

Deja Vu...

This stupid idea gets predicted every few years. Check this one out from early 2000 [zdnet.com], 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.

What features of MS Office are really used?

I like to ask folks who are rigid about sticking with MS Office what features they use and/or in their minds really make MS Office stand out. Normally there's not much of a response beyond things along the lines of "it's what I'm used to", "I can open documents other people send me", etc. Personally, I think a majority of non-technical people really don't care what Office-style product they use, and are much more concerned about whether they are using the software that "everyone else is using". And granted, there are people that actually use and utilize specific features in MS Office, but if those were the only ones who actively purchased MS Office, I don't think it'd be considered the de facto standard of Office applications.

Just my 2c.

Nope, Won't happen

This will never happen for the same reason it hasn't been done up to now - If there was M$ Office available for Linux, why would anyone need to buy M$ Windows... - M$ knows this and won't enable a competing operating system to impeed their operating system market share. The only reason they make a version for the Mac is because of legal arrangements between the two companies, and that agreement is most likely to be ended within 5 years as Apple develops their new productivity applications to replace the current M$ Office applications that continue to stagnate on the Mac platform. ODF is a contributing factor, but it'll be awhile before that takes hold in corporate America and thus becomes the new defacto standard.

Cost/Benefit Analysis for MS (is it worth it?)

In my opinion I doubt that the development effort to bring Office to Linux desktops is worth it for Microsoft.
Costs:
Programmer effort including learning/using libraries that I doubt MS programmers have lots of experience with.
Potentially making Linux a more viable-looking desktop OS alternative to Windows
Potential added complexity to the codebase
Benefits:
Miniscule amount of sales to a small market
Improve their image of working with non-MS technologies

It just doesn't seem like they have a lot to gain from doing this...

Where's the benefit?

In order for this to become reality, there needs to be a clear business benefit to Microsoft.

If Office is about the only thing keeping people on Windows (and you can bet Microsoft won't willingly give up that monopoly), then a port has no benefit.

Let's look at this from the reverse perspective: benefit to Microsoft customers.

You can get Microsoft site licensing for just Office (on the assumption that you'll be buying every PC with an OS license anyway and you pay for any upgrades individually as and when).

Where is the business benefit in me shifting all desktops to Linux if I intend to maintain a Microsoft site license? Because I bet you anything you like a Microsoft site license which includes "Office (Linux Edition)" would be more expensive than the "Office for Windows" equivalent. And I'm still stuck with all my data in a proprietary format.

Most organisations following a desktop Linux migration have been either to save money or (more commonly) to avoid having to store data in a proprietary format. Licensing Microsoft "Office for Linux" would eliminate both of those benefits.

False Analogy

His logic is that because MS created an Office for Macintosh, therefore it will create a port for Linux. But Linux operates in a different space with a different user base than Macintosh. Further, Microsoft's relationship with Linux would have to be more similar to Microsoft's relationship to Apple for this to be a valid analogy.

I think a better analogy would be to compare SQL Server Express to MySQL and PostgreSQL. SQL Server was and is an expensive technology but Express is free. Why did MS do that? To compete with Open Source DBs. I believe it is more likely that when Open Office acquires a sufficient fan base to worry Microsoft they will either slash the price of Office or else release Office Express or some such version that is meant to compete ON WINDOWS with the Open Office space.

IOW, it is just as valid to assume that MS will create a WINDOWS variant of Office to compete with Open Office than it is to assume that they will create a LINUX version to do so. And, I think, more likely.

Nasty problem...

Pick a distro...any distro... They all work slightly differently. MS is not going to release an open-source version of Office that can be recompiled at will, because - well - they're still Microsoft. So, I'm betting that Office will act broken on a lot of distros and add to MS's image as a producer of buggy software. MS knows this all too well and thus won't release office for "Linux" in the first place. Maybe as a package guaranteed to work under RHEL or something, but still unlikely...

-b.

Building Blocks

I don't think many people "get" how MS is built as a company.

Rarely have I seen another company whose products are so heavily interlocked and relying on each other. MS doesn't sell individual products, it sells building blocks of a "microsoft world". I still think Gates' dream is to run everything in your house, office, etc.

MS Office is built heavily on MS Windos. There's even a whole secret API especially so that MS Office can beat competing products. Windos, in turn, sells mostly (in the corporate environment) because of Office. Exchange/Outlook are so common because they "fit into" the landscape, and are integrated heavily with both.

The Xbox is boosted by the fact that it uses largely the same APIs (DirectX) as the Windos PC.

Even the other MS hardware - keyboards, mice, etc. - have special support in the OS. There's hardly any product in the MS portfolio that is not supported, helped along or built upon by half a dozen others.

So will MS ever take one of their products out of its natural environment and move it somewhere else? They've tried here and there - IE and Office on the Mac, for example - and none of that works so very well. IE for Mac is dead. Office on Mac is still around because a trial version ships with every new Mac and due to its dominance in the corporate environment. But on the Mac it's just another application.

Office on Linux? Don't think so. They're not going to give corporations any reason to switch away from Windos, because who knows what's next? These hippies might think about replacing Exchange with something much better and cheapter next!

VBscript

They might port Office to Linux, but like apple, they'll forego creating or supporting a decent VBscript parser. And that's what all these businesses want. Never mind that it's impossible anyway, since all of these scripts will be full of hardcoded paths like 'C:\Program Files\myapp\some path I thought was cute.ini' that no UNIX will eat.

Obviously

"Office for Linux" will no doubt be released immediately following Microsoft's long anticipated version of "Wings for Pigs."

Missing the obvious

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?

By then, OpenOffice might not be so irritating

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.

I'll believe it when I see it

This seems to pop up on our beloved /. every couple of years or so. Personally, I would LOVE to see Office on Linux, and I think it's in Microsoft's best interest to put it out there, but I doubt it will happen. It appears they've developed a myopic, RIAA-like fixation on propping up their current market without preparing adequately for the next one. Sure they have a 90%+ marketshare of the desktop, and finding a computer without Word is almost as hard as finding a TV without satellite or cable, but that's now. OpenOffice is making inroads into that market. Google is doing an end-run around the whole market by releasing Writely and Spreadsheets. Apple has their own office products. Adobe wants to make Powerpoint irrelevant by using flash for presentations. All it would really take is for one or two of those ideas to catch on to see Microsoft lose a fair amount of money.

Eventually, someone at Microsoft will realize that Linux / *BSD / *NIX WILL cut into their server market, and to a lesser extend the desktop market, and there is NOTHING they can do to prevent that. So long as Microsoft exists, there will be people on Slashdot bashing it, and they will hook a wi-fi card to an abacus before booting a windows box. The dumb thing to do, which what Redmond is doing now, woul be to ignore them, or worse villify them in some way as being communist or anti-American for not wanting to shell out large amounts of cash for an OS and software. The smart thing to do would be to finding markets where they can reach them. Office on *NIX would be one way to do that.

We know Office will run on *BSD. It's already running on Mac OS X. One would hope that it would not be impossible to run Office on Linux. I would like to think that there are at least a few geeks on the Office team that got loaded on half-caf double decaf expresso lattes with a twist of lemon and have ported it just to see if it could be done. Only time will tell.

Catch 22

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).

Re:Office on linux? Not natively.

The amount of dependencies that would need to be ported before porting office itself would be prohibitive.

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

Re:Office on linux? Not natively.

Actually, IIRC, the Mac OS version of Office is really more or less a separate product. They don't share much of a codebase at all (according to something I read long ago that I can no longer attribute or back up).

If there were ever to be an Office on Linux, my money would be on it being a port from the OS X Office, not the Win32 Office. I don't know which OS X API they've used, but such a port would still have at least some aspects of a simple Unix-to-Unix port.