Of course, nothing is officially announced, and I’m not sure the connection to Java is quite enough to warrant that BUT keep in mind that Microsoft is working fairly closely to Xamarin, the company made by previous Mono developers. A Microsoft Office running on top of Mono for cross-platform compatibility is not all THAT big of a stretch!
I don’t know what Office has been written in, or how far they have gone with its push into the Office Online but this could be very interesting, and beneficial, news! It also means that Linux IS gaining enough ground to get recognized.
I doubt it. If anything I think it is much more likely that, as with Android, they are thinking simply of writing a client for accessing Office 365 - a good way of keeping their Office income as people move increasingly to Linux as their underlying OS.
Doesn’t make much sense considering the current push to make Microsoft a “devices and services” company and to boost their cloud-based and subscription products. As john_hudson says, a client for Office 365 is much more likely.
I’m very… Well MS did release a version for Ipads. Not to well received I have read. I also think that the push of office users to the cloud is moor important for MS.
Here in Sweden it isn’t pass a day whiteout the question comes up in media:
-do we really have to use MS office?
There is a lot of schools that already converted to LO in Sweden. I read a survey a couple a days ago and the use of MS office in company’s are very low compared to the number of licenses paid for.
Oh yes it would be nice to have another alternative in Linux on the office front. On the other hand, LO in the cloud:P ?
I hardly ever touch my Microsoft installations and all my work is LO.
But I do know I can use Word, Excel etc… online via my MS login, even from a Linux machine.
I actually find LO easier to use and more intuitive.
Same here. Actually, I can’t recall the last time I even opened MS Office. I think it was back 2005 or even earlier. In fact, the last time I even opened it to fix it on clients’ machines was back at 2009 or earlier.
I am exclusively using Apache’s OpenOffice, so pretty much the same thing as LO.
Personally I see Microsoft possibly just going almost full cloud with office as an alternative to google docs but with more functionality.
Sure they will still offer the commercial suite and still keep it traditional but if Microsoft is smart (which they arent) they would go for something that business owners could use on any platform that includes linux.
I may jump on board if they do that, if its a small fee on a per month basis I would not necessarily object to using it.
Most people only use a fraction of what the Office applications are capable of, but until that 80% is available online it is going to be a hard sell.
One thing about Microsoft moving to the cloud is they are starting from a desktop-centric environment and that is where their experience lies. They use the cloud to accentuate their offerings. In Office this includes being able to save files to OneDrive easily and even being able to navigate your OneDrive through a browser and, at option, open it locally (but it still saves to the cloud location even if the computer isn’t associated with that account).
I’m not saying that is a bad thing. I love being able to open my OneDrive files in full-blown MS Office via the browser and get all of the tools available to edit it and when I get home I pick up where I left off.
On the other hand Google was born in the Cloud and lives there so that their desktop level (Chrome OS and Android) are more-or-less simple devices to tie-into their online offerings. This also, is not bad because all you need a browser to access and edit your files, as well as anybody else you are sharing with.
So for Microsoft it is a split between focusing on the web (and directly competing with Google) and/or focusing on the native clients and compete with the “shrinking” desktop market. Either way it could be a win for Linux unless they close out the Online version to Linux users (Direct X?)
On Mon 05 May 2014 04:46:01 PM CDT, BSDuser wrote:
what happens when your cloud provider goes away?!
I rest my cloud M’lord…
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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On Thu, 01 May 2014 13:06:04 +0000, dragonbite wrote:
> Of course, nothing is officially announced, and I’m not sure the
> connection to Java is quite enough to warrant that BUT keep in mind
> that Microsoft is working fairly closely to ‘Xamarin’
> (https://xamarin.com/), the company made by previous Mono developers. A
> Microsoft Office running on top of Mono for cross-platform compatibility
> is not all THAT big of a stretch!
Except that there’s at least a rumour (and I think it’s more than that)
that MS is deprecating .NET in its entirety, and Office probably isn’t
written entirely in .NET anyways.
That said, if they ported the Microsoft messaging service (ie, the e-mail/
MAPI interfaces) to Linux, that would be a boon for the Linux desktop - a
lot of third party mail programs for Windows rely on MAPI, and that it’s
not available on platforms other than Windows complicates development for
xplat versions of those proprietary clients. I’m looking at you,
GroupWise (which actually is a very good system, but alas, the Linux
client is no longer under development).
