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MS Office for Linux?



Today, Oommen Thomas gleaned this insight:

First, let me say that I think that forcing Microsoft to do a port of
office for Linux as a punishment for being a monopoly is a silly idea.
Wether it sells well or not, or even if they give it away for free, it's
still a Microsoft product, and if anything at all, would DISCOURAGE
competition from other office software developers, rather than encourage
it. This is hardly the penalty I want a monopoly to endure. Then:

> The question here is, if M$Office (and IE) for Mac, why not for Linux (or
> any other Unix)? Possibly because M$ fears that such a move will make it
> lose at least some desktop users whose life is glued to M$-Office (and 
> hence to M$ Win) now.

Perhaps, but I don't think so.  I think it's more that they don't feel
that doing an Office port will be profitable AT THIS TIME.  After all,
many people who use Linux do so because it's inexpensive (free!), and
Microsoft's products are not.  Others use Linux because it is a very solid
OS, where MS products tend to crash a lot.  I wonder what market Office
would have on Linux products.  While I'm sure there are some who would buy
it, I suspect that the numbers are reletively small.

As far as I know, the two most common uses for Linux are still as
inexpensive servers, and as inexpensive development platforms.  The
"users" of such systems are generally techies like us with little need for
complicated office products.  Most of us are happy with emacs or vi for
word processing, and something like Star Office or Applix is most
certainly overkill.  

Bearing in mind that Star Office can be had for free, and that there are
other alternatives available which are also inexpensive (or even free,
such as office suite projects from the Gnome and KDE people), I'd say that
the vast majority of Linux users have no need for MS office, and the
market for it would be pretty small.  I for one would not buy it, for all
of the above reasons.  I just don't need it.

The real market for these applications is with the marketing and sales
types, and, lets face it, these people just ain't using Linux.  Sure there
are exceptions to that; to some degree my company is one.  But we are a
Linux company, and even we have a few users who use Windows regularly.
Microsoft owns the desktop, and they simply need it to do their job
effectively, because everyone else is using it.

This, if nothing else, is an indication that Microsoft has real monopoly
power.  You have some companies who, for a variety of reasons, truly want
to use only Linux, or even some other operating system (why anyone would
want to use anything but Linux is beyond me... :) and they simply can't,
because they can't effectively communicate with their business partners
without MS products.

> Everybody needs a level playing field to compete in a market.
> It is not at all a matter of for/against any X/Y/Z company.

Right.  And since all of business has decided to standardize on MS Office,
the sensible choice (among other penalties) is for Microsoft to open up
the definitions of their file formats so that all software companies
and OSS developers can write software that can manipulate these documents.
They should also be forced to participate in open forums where other
software producers (free and otherwise) can influence the design of these
formats, to make them better and more efficient.

Why doesn't Microsoft want to do this?  Well, it's only a guess, but I
think it's because they know that someone else can and WILL do it better
AND more inexpensively, and Microsoft will die as everyone switches to the
new, better products.  But maybe that's just wishful thinking... :)

As for that port of Office?  As Linux continues to improve in ease of use
for the average user, and more and more people start using it because of
stability and low captial investment, and the marketing and sales types
have buy-in, I think you'll see that port. Because then, Microsoft Office
will have a market on Linux.

Isn't $90,000,000,000 enough?

"There's greed, avarice, and then Microsoft."


-- 
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
------------------------------------------------------
Derek D. Martin      |  Unix/Linux Geek
derekm at mediaone.net  |  derek at cerberus.ne.mediaone.net
------------------------------------------------------

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