Microsoft Looking At Office For Linux In 2014
t seems thanks to the increasing market-share of Android devices and the rise of Linux on the desktop thanks to the many commercial Linux gaming initiatives that have been shared in recent months, Microsoft is being forced to take a serious look at Linux and a meaningful look at releasing their popular Office software for Linux in 2014.
It’s already known that Microsoft will be releasing a port of their Office suite for Android in 2013. As I tweeted this morning, “heard this weekend in #Brussels that #Microsoft might release a native #Linux version of #Office in 2014.”
From a source in Brussels, Belgium during the Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) this past weekend, I was informed that Microsoft is having a “meaningful look” at a full Linux port of Office thanks to Linux showing signs of commercial viability on the desktop. Right now some versions of Microsoft Office will work under Linux via the use of Wine or CodeWeavers’ CrossOver to varying extents, but this port being evaluated internally at Microsoft is a fully native implementation. Evidently there’s already some port to unknown completion that has been done internally at the company.
Office on Android will be an interesting stepping stone and Microsoft already does contribute to the upstream Linux kernel in the form of their Hyper-V virtualization drivers for the enterprise. Microsoft has also been an unlikely sponsor of various Linux projects from continuing to back the great LinuxTag conference to large targeted ad buys on this very site.
one thing for sure: having done without Microsoft Office since the early
'90s, i’m sure i can live without it some more, even if they give away
the Linux version…
in the early '90s when there was no ‘MS Office’…there was just MS Word
taking market share from WordPerfect, WordStar, XyWrite, AMI Pro and
others by bundling it with the OS (giving it away)
imo even a FREE and open source (which will not happen in a LONG time)
MS Office on Linux is NOT a good thing…because when LibreOffice,
OpenOffice, KOffice, StarOffice and the others die because no one uses
them any more the freedom of choice and strength through diversity will
die with them.
> imo even a FREE and open source (which will not happen in a LONG time)
> MS Office on Linux is NOT a good thing…because when LibreOffice,
> OpenOffice, KOffice, StarOffice and the others die because no one uses
> them any more the freedom of choice and strength through diversity will
> die with them.
Not really.
There are organizations that mandate internally use of openoffice in
their Windows machines, instead of Office.
On the other hand, people that do not switch to Linux because they do
need Office (it has some features that OOo/LO do not have), now will be
able to do the switch.
I see it at one more diversity option. Not bad.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Office is the only thing that makes significant profits for MS now though their enterprise offerings are beginning to make more money; Windows, which used to be a money spinner, is no longer. They lost out in Munich because the City Council went over to Linux and OpenOffice; they may be able to reduce the amount of income they lose when people go over to Linux by allowing them to keep using Office. Otherwise, LibreOffice becomes a real threat.
Microsoft is 15 years too late with this. They could have provided MSOffice for linux way back then. At that time, they would have had StarOffice as a competitor. But MSOffice for linux might have taken off, perhaps Sun would never have bought out StarOffice and used it as the basis of OpenOffice.
I suspect it is too late for Microsoft to overwhelm the competition.
I use Microsoft Office 2007 through Crossover on my OpenSUSE 12.2 box. I use both MS Office and LibreOffice on my machine for different things. For word processing, LibreOffice has a much better word processor and Impress for presentation software I find to be more feature rich. I however like Excel better than Calc because there are some features in it that make it much quicker to use. Overall, however, I get rather irritated by how Office will open up new spreadsheets in the same instance of Excel making it difficult to compare sheets unless you open up a new instance of Excel open the file in the new instance so it lacks a lot of intuitiveness.
I would welcome MS Office for Linux as I deal with a lot of .docx, .pptx and .xlsx formats for my job and since LibreOffice doesn’t always open them properly I need to have MS Office on my system. Having a native Linux MS Office would never preclude me from using LibreOffice. I really don’t see this as a threat to open source software, just having another option available out there and further validating Linux Desktop as a viable platform. I just hope they don’t only do an Ubuntu version as Red Hat / CentOS and most certainly OpenSUSE are much better from my perspective.
On 2013-02-07, futureboy <futureboy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> I would welcome MS Office for Linux as I deal with a lot of .docx,
> .pptx and .xlsx formats for my job and since LibreOffice doesn’t always
> open them properly <SNIP>
+1. Also LibreOffice has nothing suitable for opening Access files. I
find that most things people do in Excel can usually be done better in
Access.
On 2013-02-08 13:47, flymail wrote:
> On 2013-02-07, futureboy <futureboy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>> I would welcome MS Office for Linux as I deal with a lot of .docx,
>> .pptx and .xlsx formats for my job and since LibreOffice doesn’t always
>> open them properly <SNIP>
>
> +1. Also LibreOffice has nothing suitable for opening Access files. I
> find that most things people do in Excel can usually be done better in
> Access.
Heh! If access can use mysql or postgress as backends, that would be
very interesting indeed (not only use, but create databases). Maybe then
the Linux databases would feel the competition and do a really good
access competitor (as in visual design facilities, not in the backends).
The only good one is rekall, and it has been abandoned.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 2013-02-08, Carlos E. R. <robin_listas@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> Heh! If access can use mysql or postgress as backends, that would be
> very interesting indeed (not only use, but create databases).
I’m pretty sure Microsoft’s Access’ 2003’s Jet backend could be
substituted with mySQL. Since they introduced the ACE backend for Access
2007, I’m not so sure because I haven’t kept up to date with Microsoft
post 2005.
On 2013-02-08 23:26, john hudson wrote:
>
> It has long been possible to connect MS Office to mysql; I assume it
> still is:
>
> ‘MySQL :: Connecting MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access to MySQL using
> ODBC’ (http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?65,148441,148441)
Yes, but I think that it may be possible that if Access is ported to
Linux then MS will make it even easier, needing no tricks.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)