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Microsoft Office for Linux 'inevitable'

Posted by Spy August 19, 2006 12:43 AM with 2 comment(s)

Filed under: Office

Microsoft will release a version of Office to run on Linux within the "next couple of years", according to the chief executive of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL).

"They did it once with Apple; they will do it again with Linux," Stuart Cohen said during an interview with vnunet.com at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francicso.

OSDL aims to advance Linux and open source. The consortium employs Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and is funded by IT vendors including IBM, HP and Intel.

Cohen argued that Microsoft will be compelled to create a Linux version in a move to pre-empt the further rise of Sun Microsystems' open source OpenOffice productivity suite.

"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."

Cohen compared the expected Linux Microsoft Office version to Oracle's Database 10g Express Edition application launched in November.

The software offers a free entry-level database in an effort to fight off competition from open source competitors.

Cohen claimed that Microsoft is starting to soften its stance against open source. "They are trying to cooperate," said Cohen. "They have now acknowledged that Linux is here to stay."

The change is attitude is limited to Microsoft as a company, he stressed, maintaining that Windows and Linux will remain fierce competitors.

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Source: www.infomaticsonline.co.uk

Comments

bear_luke said:

I don't think this is true.

August 19, 2006 5:02 PM

Mike Dimmick said:

When Microsoft first wrote Excel and Word for Macintosh (in 1984), the IBM PC wasn't even yet the dominant hardware platform. The Apple II still had substantial market share. The Macintosh was expected to, and did, sell quite well. Also, at the time there was no dominant graphical environment on the PC (Windows wouldn't arrive until 1985 and took until at least 1990 to become installed by default on PCs). Microsoft's productivity applications on the PC, Multiplan and Word, weren't GUI applications and were far from dominant. The new platform gave Microsoft a significant market opportunity to take an early lead and to get experience with writing GUI software.

A recent survey by OneStat (based on logs of the User-Agent header from web browsers) suggested that Linux has under 0.5% of the total computing usage share, and of course that figure is spread across numerous distributions and platforms. Logic would suggest that if Microsoft were to add support for a currently-unsupported platform, they would actually add back support for Windows 2000 (dropped in Office 2007, a little over 6% usage share), then Windows 98 (a little over 2.5%), which was dropped for Office 2003.

You also have to consider that a large number of the users who tend to use Linux on the desktop are virulently anti-Microsoft or against the whole idea of paying for software. All this adds up to an abysmal return-on-investment.

Inevitable? Far from it.

August 22, 2006 3:25 PM

About Spy

Hello world, as they say. I'm in Melbourne Australia and work as a Systems Administrator. I go to work every day with a smile on my face as I just love my work. Our company works across 30+ sites around the state so I travel a bit. We use mostly MS products, IBM hardware and 100% Cisco networking...it's a sweet mix for sure. I've been around Bink's site since it's inception way back when it was just a group on the MS site...that was a while ago. Bink.nu is the leading source of Microsoft news on the web that's for sure and I love being a part of Steven's team. Anyway, hope you enjoy the site.