pcauthority.com.au — OSDL expects low cost Linux Office version to keep Open Office at bay. Microsoft within the "next couple of years" will release a version of its Office productivity to run on Linux, Stuart Cohen, chief executive for the Open Source Development Labs, predicted in an interview with vnunet.com at the Linuxworld conference in San Francicso.
Aug 18, 2006 View in Crawl 4
gmorganAug 19, 2006
Just because it gets ported doesn't mean you have to use it, support from MS is still support.
kazrogAug 19, 2006
Actually, in all seriousness, Office is what MS does best, Office 2007 looks truly innovative, and I wish them luck. They will still crash and burn in firey doomy death though! Doom doom doom doom doom doom.....
thezorchAug 19, 2006
I really seriously doubt that this will happen. Open Office is maturing very rapidly. Yes, it has problems but compare OO to what it was a year ago and you will see major improvements. MS Office is big, a CPU and memory hog, and excessively expensive. OpenOffice 2.0 is available in a portable version you can load up in a USB flash drive. You can't do that with Office. MS Office is too heavily integrated with IE and the Windows OS. This is also another reason why Office would never work on Linux outside of WINE, assuming WINE has all of the appropriate binaries that Office requires which I doubt. No, this will never happen.
freebit50Aug 19, 2006
Hell has frozen over.
danielwsmitheeAug 19, 2006
While it is true there are some feature missing from Office for Mac, Visual Basic, Access etc. Overall the Mac group at Microsoft does a stellar job. I prefer Office for the Mac to Office for Windows. It just tends to be more usable, a lot of that admittedly comes from the fact that it has many of the OS X application design philosophies, but I prefer it.
Closed AccountAug 19, 2006
Wake me when the headline "Microsoft battles Sun for control of the Linux desktop!" appears. That'll be worth a screenshot for the archives.
alexthebeastAug 20, 2006
How can I say this,,, ehm,,, In my opinion it is like taking the steering wheel of a skoda and fixing it on a Ferrari.Why any linux user would want to do this, I dont know, but apparently windows (another distro) believe this is what linux users have been waiting for all this time.
gmorganAug 21, 2006
You can get commercial support, its called crossover office.
gmorganAug 21, 2006
No actually MSO is the best suite out there by a reasonable margin. The only question mark is over binary black hole file standards but this may be addressed by OpenXML.People don't have to use MSO even if it did get ported but I refuse to slam MS when they are actually making good products.What we want is MS to port their worthwhile software to .Net then make their money off selling a .Net *nix platform and maybe by selling their own Linux distro with everything built in for grandma.
carzorstelatisAug 21, 2006
Damn digg and its fckd comment threading