It's in the best interest of Office to be on every platform possible. It's in the best interest of Windows for Office to be an exclusive. That's the tension that's been there for years.
But Office, especially with its growing Web and sharing underpinnings, may be a more enduring product than Windows. If this is indeed the case, it makes sense for Office to be on every platform possible, making it the standard for document creation and sharing.
Microsoft is weak in the smartphone and tablet space. It makes a ton of sense for Office to go here; it's not like strong Office products on iOS would hurt Surface sales. And now with subscription plans and Windows becoming less ubiquitous, why not Linux?
It's not Office's job to protect Windows, especially if Windows can't protect Office. If Office doesn't go on more platforms, people will switch to other solutions because they are using non-Windows devices all the time. Windows alone will kill Office in the long term.
I don't see where this whole "Windows is becoming less ubiquitous" is coming from. Maybe market share has dropped a bit, but, Microsoft still rules the basically the whole desktop market.
Sometimes in the startup world with all the glowing Apple logos, we lose sense of the rest of the world (heck, even the rest of the United States).
Microsoft no longer has the mind share of either the public or the development community. The "cool kids" tend not to develop on MS platforms these days by choice. Look at Jeff Atwood, he was a prominant asp.net mvc dev (stackoverflow) and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse). This trend is all the more troublesome because C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?
Also, look at Microsoft's big pushes, bing and winphone 7+. Both have been at best partial successes, and they need more than that for a company their size.
The exact moment in time that is the biggest problem for a company facing potential decline like Microsoft is not when they have ceded the majority of marketshare to a competitor, nor is it when their revenues and marketshare being to contract. The key moment is the inflection point in their growth rate, when the 2nd derivative turns from positive to negative. That's the point where if nothing is done then eventually the peak will be reached and decline will set in. That's the point where there is still the opportunity to turn things around, it's the point where the resources are still available and the least work needs to be done to make a change.
>and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse).
Fwiw he went with Rails for Discourse because the entire stack has to be both free as in beer, and Free as in liberty, since it's competing against phpbb and the like, which are both f/Free and good enough for most people.
For Discourse to take off in the way he wants it to, he can't risk relying on better features to compensate for cost differential, he has to eliminate cost differential.
If he were building another SO or closed-source SaaS product, asp.net mvcc would probably still be an option.
I would have thought that the primary users of Office are the corporate world. Large companies use Windows, and will continue to use Windows for at least the next decade. Fashionable development may have mind share, but corporate practice isn't particularly fashionable. Corporate licenses must make up a huge proportion of office income.
Apple's made no real moves to become more corporate friendly in the desktop space (and things like their recent blocking of Java definitely won't help them) and Linux on the corporate desktop is miles away from adoption (some public bodies which did adopt it have moved back to Windows).
People talk about the new era of tablet computing, but tablets are pretty much useless for a lot of typing-heavy work. Perhaps eventually a descendant of the tablet (perhaps something like the chromebook) will start to dislodge windows for lighter-weight corporate usage, but I believe it'll be a long time coming. Most large companies have piles of weird internal web-based tools which can't deal with touch, perhaps run on Java or Flash or depend on IE6 technologies, and the slow and cumbersome process of replacing them will take an age.
Tablets are fine for typing-heavy work, just use a bluetooth keyboard with the tablet on a stand. This mode of operation isn't common yet, but that's because tablets are still relatively new.
Edit: to clarify, right now we're at a point where it's rare for a tablet (or smartphone) to be someone's primary or only computing device, but as they become more popular that will increasingly be the case, and then people will develop new habits and new modes of use to fit these devices into their work or their lives. Meaning that if people are using them at work then they'll tend to have some way to use a physical keyboard with them for the times when an onscreen keyboard won't cut it.
I don't think it's so much tablets that are the problem. It's that programs are steadily being replaced with platform-agnostic managed things like web services. Maybe we're not there with Office yet, but once you're at the point that Office is the only primary anchor holding you to Windows, it's a pretty big target for someone else to move in.
>C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?
As an iOS developer, I'm interested in Windows Phone. In my past I programmed a bit with the .NET API's (mainly VB, later on a little bit of C#). I've recently dabbled in Android, and personally I don't like the tooling (Eclipse, emulator slow).
Just last week I downloaded the MonoTouch toolkit and will experiment a bit with creating a multi-platform (iOS / Android) app with a partially shared codebase in C#. So far I like the following things about the MonoTouch toolkit:
a) UIKit methods / classes are called more or less the same. Don't need to look up the API much.
b) from what I understand, it should be possible to create my own wrappers around Obj-C (iOS) or Java (Android) objects.
c) Create optimised user interfaces for each platform. This is the part where the code will differ mostly.
d) MonoDevelop is a nice, though somewhat sparse / limited IDE. I really hate the future creep of Eclipse and imo Visual Studio could also use a little trimming in the UI - otherwise a fine product though. I love Xcode.
I'm referring to operating systems as a whole. People are spending less time using Windows devices and more time using smartphones and tablets. I'd love to use Office with syncing on my iPad, but that's not an option, so I have to find other ways to do these tasks. OS X market share is growing, but that's not what I'm referring to.
Ten years ago, almost everyone's computing time was spent on Windows. Now even people who use Windows desktops/laptops have iPads, Android phones, etc.
That's a workaround, and a US-only one so, for those who are very, very eager to run Office.
It's not a natural first option for writing documents if you're on a device which already has Google Docs, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office or anything like that.
In fact, most people will probably never even consider it an option. At least not until Microsoft provides a native version of Office for their preferred procrastination platform.
And kids growing up these days spend more (most?) of their time on mobile devices, running iOS or Android, or when on a laptop, 99% of the time in a browser.
The time when people grew up and learnt Microsoft by default is definitely over. These days you can actually grow up, learn computers and internet without ever once using Microsoft software. It's not that far fetched.
This is Microsoft's problem. They can no longer claim to be the one default everyone knows, uses and are familiar with (and hence prefer).
Over the same time period, about 75 million PCs and laptops were sold, mostly running Windows.
Android is already beating Windows in terms of rate at which devices are shipped running it. If people start using Android devices for more stuff, and consequently use Windows devices less, Microsoft is in big trouble.
But the issue here is that you are comparing fundamentally different pieces of technology, and yes, yes, a smart phone is a computer too, but I don't see anyone using them for general purpose computing right now and to be honest, I don't see it any time in the future.
Go in to any office, literally, any office, and you won't find anyone working on an iPad or their Samsung Galaxy, they will be working on a PC or a laptop, most likely running Windows and for the most part they are happy with it.
Comparing the sales of Windows against the sales of Android is like comparing the sales of Toasters against the sales of Microwaves, sure, they might be at some level similar appliances but they are used for completely different reasons.
A smartphone is used for consumption, it is a luxury most people have or aspire to have and while the PC or Laptop may fall in to that department at home, in the office, they are used for creation (except from when we are bored of course...) and for the foreseeable future, that's how things will remain until the space is completely "disrupted" (whatever that means.)
I'm going to put it like this, I don't live in Silicone Valley, I live in a small town in the north of the UK, and every person I know and who's house I have been to. Every single one has both a smart phone and a PC, that's not just me saying it, that's every single person.
The reason why the numbers are so different is something crucial and so simple that we always seem to overlook it:
Normal people[1] only need one computer for their home and they share it, but they want to be in contact with their family via phones at all times, and the kids these days don't want a Nokia 3310, they want the newest, most expensive model, because they are COOL.
You can attribute it to whatever merely visible swing in the market you want to, but that is the simple truth.
[1] - By which I mean people who aren't in the tech industry.
You're missing something big here: Software support. In the past it was completely reasonable to develop all your stuff Win-only. Hence the lock-in, hence the market share. Nowadays, even in forward looking big corps, when new software projects are planned, Android and iOS support is usually not only considered but a priority. That's why we see more and more software becoming POSIX compatible. And once this is all done, the OS becomes completely interchangable, at which point MS looses big time, they basically loose their long time business model of domination through Windows market share.
Once this transition has been completed, MS will become a Software company like all the others, they won't have any home turf advantage anymore.
For this reason I'm very skeptical whether MS will allow the Office port. It would basically show that they have accepted their fate (which would be a good sign for their management however).
Okay, I just wandered the halls of my company, a privately held insurance/financial services company.
Most of us drones are issued standard Windows desktops or notebooks. But the story is far different in the VP suites. Many of them have iPads with keyboards. They use them, love them for meetings etc.
This has driven our company to find more and more ways to support them, since when a VP says "Support my device" things often happen.
Eventually this will trickle down to us unwashed masses, and we'll be able to use iOS and Android without having to suffer with Citrix Receiver.
It will, but it will take a long time, I think that's what the grandparent is saying. The VP doesn't care what the people 2 floors down in their cubes are using, so they'll continue to use the safe, cheap choice until Windows is no longer the safe cheap choice for office work.
"A smartphone is used for consumption" is just a bad generalization. Is making calls, sending emails and text messages "consumption"? No. And for tablets it's an even worse generalization. But still, _most_ computer usage _is_ consumption! And most of it that is not (like word processing) can be done by attaching a keyboard to a tablet. The office workers that actually need a workstation (like graphics designers, engineers and programmers) is only a small fraction of the workforce that uses a computer today. Business use is one thing (and changes there always happen a a glacial pace). But my parents and my girlfriend now rarely uses their PC.
They either use a tablet, or their smartphone if the tablet isn't nearby! So the key here is convenience, which incidentally is why the laptop became so popular in the consumer market. When that PC dies, they will take a hard look at whether they really need to replace it.
> And most of it that is not (like word processing) can be done by attaching a keyboard to a tablet. The office workers that actually need a workstation (like graphics designers, engineers and programmers) is only a small fraction of the workforce that uses a computer today
The fraction of worldwide workforce that sits in an office doing work that requires both a keyboard and a screen larger than 10" includes about any office-person whose actual output is not just talking...
Thanks for writing this up. Too often I hear the numbers quoted in sales and think this exact thing. How often do you buy a PC? Every 3 years or so (probably more for most families)? A phone though.. Every 2? The price points of phones and tablets allow a total upgrade a lot quicker than a desktop/laptop.
I agree with you that this seems silly. But Microsoft itself seems to buy it. Why have they created a "mobile" interface for Windows 8 that annoys desktop users? And now Office for Linux. That's a surprise.
Windows is everywhere, but Microsoft only gets money when they sell a new version. New computers are cheaper and cheaper, so they have to lower Windows price also.
With Windows 8, it seems Microsoft itself is ready to bury the desktop. It's a tremendous mistake, but MS has a long history of completely failing to recognize trends.
The mobile market is enormous and MS missed it (so far), but the desktop/laptop market isn't going away any time soon and they seem to be missing that, too.
Windows is a good desktop environment for the most part. But by trying to make Windows a monolith on all platforms, they seem to be rushing towards making it suboptimal for all platforms and ceding a market they are the undisputed owner of. Or maybe the mass of computer users will just accept Windows 8 as the new normal and put up with it no matter how much they hate it. After all, they've been doing that with Office for 20 years.
A lot of people are still getting their first smartphone. They already have a Windows laptop or desktop at home. Also, desktops and laptops tend to last longer (for regular users, I'd suggest around 3-5 years) than a smartphone (lifespan of which is usually about 2 years, after which you're upgraded). Finally, a smartphone is "free". Well, not really, but it can certainly feel like it - you can go into a store, pay nothing up front and walk out with a £600 smartphone. People tend to pay up front for desktops and laptops, however.
I've never visited San Franscisco & seen this 'start-up world' you speak of, but the widespread use of Macs surprises me a bit. In all my IRL interactions with developers, it's always free software variants of *nix with a minority of Macs. I guess I interact with the FOSS/Security/Privacy community a lot though. I guess if your customers use them it's good to use them.
This is the definition of "becoming less ubiquitous". It doesn't have to mean they're falling apart and about to be irrelevant, they just have less of a market share than they did
Just the be clear, market share != install base. Market share is basically the percentage of new computers being sold (presumably limited to desktop computers).
Things to note:
- This could just mean that sales of new Windows computers fell relative to computers with other operating systems, but the sales of Windows computers in absolute numbers still grew.
- This could mean Window users are buying fewer new computers, but Apple users are more prone to upgrade their computers to get the next new shiny model (or upgrade to escape some Rev 1.0 issues that Apple refuses to acknowledge/fix).
Actually the opposite is true, apparently Mac users keep their computers for much longer than Windows users. A key reason is probably the price of a new Mac, another that time and OS upgrades generally don't make a Mac much slower (the exception being Lion). Many Windows PCs are simply thrown away because it's cheaper for a non-techie to buy a new one than to reinstall the OS an all their apps.
They do, but large companies are no longer investing in the Wintel PC + Windows. Windows 8 trepedation will put the nail in the coffin, as Enterprise IT is afraid of Windows 8, and the key new PC form factors (Ultrabook, Tablet) are going to require it.
So companies are looking at landing Windows 7 in Citrix and VMWare VDI environments. This is scary for Microsoft, as both companies are looking at breaking up the Windows platform into layers, and injecting their own platform tools.
Microsoft needs a landing place for Office that isn't completely controlled by VMWare/Citrix, which is the true cash cow now that the OS is becoming commoditized. So they are finally investing in VDI with Server 2012, and supporting Office via HTTP and alternate platforms.
If you think about 1983 vs. 2013, VDI is the green screen, and tablets are the PCs.
As per statistics... Mac OS is rising faster than Linux. No doubt Windows is ruler in this market but soon Mac OS and Linux will gain good market share..
I think the parent has a point. The thing that would stop 90% of business users from being able to use Linux is Microsoft Office.
In the past several years, I've come to believe that Office is a much more potent monopoly than Windows itself. Of course, I also think Office is a blight on the software world and the sooner it dies, the better for everyone, but that's another topic.
The fact is, Microsoft can only maintain the status quo (and this has been true for the better part of two decades) by milking their monopoly so it makes great business sense to get Office on as many platforms as possible.
I imagine this wouldn't be happening if Android weren't around, but this move would allow a lot of people to migrate to Linux and remain with Microsoft Office, and I suspect that's exactly what will happen for a lot of folks.
Let's face it. No one wants Windows 8, and a lot of people would choose an alternative but the elephant in the room has always been Office. I'm all for supporting competitors to Office, but they will continue to fight an uphill battle against an entrenched and corrupt foe who does everything in its power to undermine competition, DoJ notwithstanding.
Given that people are not so much abandoning Windows for other choices on the desktop, but many are abandoning the desktop itself - Windows is essentially non-existent in the mobile market and its success in the tablet realm remains to be seen - this is another reason Microsoft should make this move.
There's a tipping point where non-Windows operating systems gain enough of a foothold that they will create enough demand to incentivize compelling non-Microsoft Office solutions.
For iOS, we've passed that point, and I believe that Microsoft is afraid of passing that point for Linux in the enterprise.
If a decent alternative to Office gains significant traction on Linux in the enterprise then Microsoft loses significant Windows and Office revenue. If providing Office for Linux staves off the competition then it can at least preserve the Office revenues.
On the desktop - a consistently good experience with a common application/document format is key. The assorted office options seriously lack in many ways -- both in usability and feature compatibility.
I prefer to look at this as, Office is seeing the desktop as becoming a diverse platform, so being more available benefits Office. Linux and OSX are becoming more accepted as compute options in a number of large companies where Windows once ruled.
Office 365 for the cloud, another step towards ubiquity.
Will it work? Who knows. But being open to adapting to changes in platform demographics is important in the application space.
I can see Office 365 possibly being supported on the Linux desktop but I will eat my hat if we see desktop Office on desktop Linux. There's hardly a market there, why would they bother?
The tension exists because Windows is what made Microsoft into the company it is, but Office is the product that truly drove Microsoft's profit. Eventually, the money has to win out. It's unnatural for it to not to.
Valve is already doing mile-length steps in terms of upending one of the Windows' biggest advantages over Linux: games. Arguably, Office is another, but this time it's supposedly Microsoft itself who is about to diminish yet another selling of point of their own operating system.
I'm really confused, if that's indeed true. You could say it follows naturally with all the screw-ups MS made recently with respect to Windows 8 & Metro UI. But really, seeing a company undermine their own business so blatantly... I don't know what to think about this.
It's a smart move. It's the "strategy tax" which is dumb. It is extraordinarily rare for it to be a smart business choice to not have all of your products be as promiscuous as possible.
Imagine where .net/visual studio/et al would be today if they'd been shipping official VMs (CLRs) targeting linux/unix ages ago.
At this point it's questionable whether or not office is really going to be the breaking point that keeps people from fleeing the MS ship. More so, there's a strong risk that it could work the other way, that people "building a life" (or a business) outside of the Windows walls could find that it's not so hard to live without office, which would hurt MS even more. Also, ensuring that office remains the de facto business standard for the foreseeable future means that MS will always have that opening to entice people back to the Windows platform, the same way mp3 players enticed people to switch to macs, iphones, and ipads.
How much money would .NET make them if it wasn't attached to Windows OS sales? If they detached .NET & Visual Studio, where will they make the money from it? For Sun, Java at least ran high end server product sales.
It's complicated. The runtime, the libraries, and the web server are all free. But Visual Studio makes money, and the team foundation system makes a lot of money. If you take all of that together then on its own it would be a company with ten figure annual revenue.
In a hypothetical alternate Universe where .net 1.0 launched on linux/unix as well and they were able to gain a lot more traction in those communities then one would expect VS and perhaps TFS sales to increase concomitantly. Also, such an independent company would probably have a wider range of products for sale if they weren't tied to the Windows/Office ATM, though of course that's more speculative.
Office is their business. If people are going to switch to Linux anyway, might as well sell them a subscription to Office still. It is starting to matter less and less which OS is running as things move to the browser and "cloud". The Windows monopoly is over, so MS would be smart to admit that and start looking for business opportunities that transcend the OS, one of which is Office.
Productivity software is still a big part of Microsoft's future (not to mention it was always their soul). Windows is a lot less so. They're beginning to figure that out.
Windows is now merely 1/3 of their income stream. I say merely to reference how far that has come down over the last decade from the peak.
In my opinion... ten years from now, if Microsoft is still relevant, Windows will be 15% or less of their income. There was a Microsoft long before there was a Windows, and I'd be inclined to bet there will be a Microsoft long after Windows matters.
The fun part to think about- I don't neccesarily wish for Windows to die (choices is nice), but if it did Microsoft would suddenly be flush with extra developers. What new projects might they start, or what ways might they be able to improve Office in actually awesome ways?
Office is, I think, one of the big revenue earners for Microsoft, so it does kinda make sense for them to make sure they can try to sell it to everybody regardless of which OS they run.
Microsoft is becoming a services company. They want to sell you a yearly subscription to the office 365 service, and it makes sense to provide that service on all platforms people use.
You can't make an omelet without breaking any eggs. Microsoft knows that windows will not be ubiquitous, so they are choosing for a smaller slice of a bigger market instead of a lock-in on a shrinking market.
Almost everyone I know who's been exposed to (and intrigued by) a friend's/acquaintance's Linux installation has been stopped by a fear of weak Office support. Aside from the hassle of partitioning and installing Linux on a Windows computer, this seems to be the single issue keeping them from switching. I'm not pretending that this anecdotal data supports a blanket statement that it is the main issue keeping people from Linux, but it certainly helps belie your blanket statement that people who would switch to Linux are relatively unaffected in that decision by Office availability.
If they soon give out the OS for free, or dirt cheap, then they will ultimately only care about the applications they sell, meaning that the host OS won't matter nearly as much.
I think that office on linux will always be a second citizen software. Linux users will have less power to force usage of open tools if microsoft office is available on linux.
a. Steam on Linux is still in beta and relatively new
b. Cutting-edge triple A titles? No, not yet. Older, but well seasoned triple-A titles? Getting there (e.g., Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2). High-quality indie titles? Quite a selection, actually (e.g., Minecraft, Humble Indie Bundles, etc...).
I am in (biological) research, and this would be a godsend in the unlikely event it's true. There are a lot of *nix users in research, but paradoxically, MS Word is a virtual requirement for submitting grants and manuscripts, and MS Excel is very commonly used to pass around datasets.
Libreoffice is unacceptably broken in a thousand small ways. The best compromise we have come up with is to edit internal documents with Google Docs until they are almost finished, then polish them in Word.
> Libreoffice is unacceptably broken in a thousand small ways
Of course, based on my painful experience, MS Word is also broken in a thousand small ways. Whether this breakage qualifies as "unacceptable" I dunno; I guess people are used to it and so have learned to avoid much of it. Yay? ><
In this context, where MS-Word is a de facto standard for various administration, "broken" means "not behaving like MS-Word". Which is perhaps the only test which MS-Word passes with flying colors.
Alas, the post-"Vista-fication" version of MS Office doesn't even behave like MS Office.
Amusing anecdote: I have 2 teenage daughters. They used to complain about having to use Open/Libre Office at home. Then the school "upgraded" Office to the newer Vista/7 compatible version. "See, kids, it does suck, just like Dad said" (I got the "upgrade" at work about the same time). After which, the version at school was so different, anyway, that they just kinda got over it and went "whatever".
I think the difference between your broken and his broken is that his are actual bugs & crashes and yours are actually more like personal preferences and interface differences.
MS Office products are generally rock solid, while OpenOffice/LibreOffice have crashed on me too many times to count. Plus buggy functionality, etc.
I might be wrong, some examples from both sides wouldn't hurt :)
Many journals allow this; less commonly funding agencies. But most of my collaborators are not programmers and do not know LaTeX, and for a non-programmer it is very difficult to learn.
Besides, I don't love LaTeX. It is a very heavyweight markup and seemingly takes forever to get things "just right".
That depends on the field (and publication), maybe it is less typical in biology? And all the research funding instruments I've used require (or at least very strongly hint) you to use Word for submitting applications.
If LibreOffice docx export does not work correctly (or import missed crucial fields / paragraphs) with the funder's templates, you might get rejected. Academic funding is already so fickle that I wouldn't even try. (Personally, that's always a major hassle, as I have to find a computer with correct version of Word installed and borrow that for some time.)
I know you're fairly new to HN, but really you don't need to sign your posts. Your username is right above the body of your comment. A signature just adds clutter.
Have you tried CrossOver with the latest Office version. I tried when considering if I should buy a Lenovo laptop to run Linux or a new MacBook. Even the most basic functionality did not work smoothly.
Office 2000 ran great on CrossOver Office. I've used it for years. But Office 2000 is very old now.
I agree with the maintenance point but as far as the "switching" point, it's worth noting that even the less-fancy VMs have supported guest-OS applications inside standalone host-OS windows for a long time. This is particularly convenient for the case described in which the guest OS is used for only one or two applications.
However, an increasing amount of my documents are in Google Docs/Drive these days. It's only for really intensive spreadsheets I bust out Excel. I can't stand LibreOffice Calc. Even the name (in a dashboard 'calc' clashes with 'calculator' ... duh, I just type 'gcalc' now). Perhaps I'm just too used to Excel, having used it for so long now.
At first, OpenOffice Calc and Writer were a nuisance that I had to learn to use. Then they became second nature, LibreOffice is now my most recommended piece of software to all my clients along with Thunderbird etc. Now, I find that LibreOffice handles all of my workload much better than Office did. Especially when dealing with international text encoding.
I realize that there is a huge, existing market that requires Office, but I wonder how many of those could go through a transition and arrive at a better place without it.
You'd be surprised at how many engineering companies (research and otherwise) use Excel. I'd argue that it is used more than Matlab or any other programming language/environment in some fields (like Mech Eng).
Now that is just a small subset of all the little corporations that use it for bookkeeping and what else (those could probably get by with libreoffice) and every other major company in the world.
Microsoft was also smart in moving to docx and xlsx because libreoffice doesn't support that very well and now has an even better reason for people to avoid switching, I'd like to assume they don't support the open formats for this same reason.
After having used OpenOffice for years, I finally decided I hate it. Maybe it's just OpenOffice for Mac, but Writer produces output that is just ugly. It's not wrong, just devoid of whatever it is that makes text look decent. I assume the kerning is bad.
I talked with a friend who found OpenOffice on her own when her computer at work didn't of MS Office, and found it highly unsuitable. In addition to ugly output, she needed document revisions which Writer apparently doesn't support. Even worse, opening MS Office documents resulted in strange, minor things happening. (No surprise there, but it doesn't really encourage people to stay with the product) Interestingly, she said the same thing I thought when I first saw OpenOffice back when it was StarOffice: instead of producing a better Office, they tried to copy MS Office and failed.
Except Excel. Microsoft Excel outpaces LibreOffice by many many many many lightyears. It's pretty much the only reason why I have Virtualbox on all my linux machines
I'm starting to appreciate Google Spreadsheets more. Hear me out: javascript in the spreadsheet. Today my boss needed me to make a get request from one of our spreadsheets when some column is edited. I just love that you can do that. Maybe Excel does something to this nature, I have no idea.
Over the last two years I have moved away from Excel, Word and PowerPoint to R/Sweave/LaTeX/beamer/git as fast as possible. I got so sick of version changes in VBA breaking code, 3rd party modules that were locked and couldn't be fixed, and binary files that suck up space in version control. I see my coworkers using spread sheets and PowerPoint files where databases and complete, reproducible reports should be used. Tremendous amounts of tacit knowledge is buried on network shares and forgotten. I find the community support for R/RStudio/LateX/git much better than Microsoft's support.
I might not be an Office Excel power user, although I'm not sure, thus can be blind to those critical features. What are the things that you can't live without in Calc ?
* Calc's pivot tables is clunky, while working on Excel 2010 is like working on butter with a hot knife. No, it's not a "getting used to" thing.
* Basic stuff like filter/sorting tools: Excel has a far better flow that helps you get the job done faster
* DataNitro
* Charting in libreoffice is broken. I use ggplot for most of my day jobs, but sometimes when you need to pull up a quick chart, LibreOffice serves to only nerf your speed. Again, not one of those "getting used to" thing
* Try pivot-tabling a 1M row csv in Calc.
* VBScript (though that's now more and more subplanted by DN)
One more thing Calc is better than Excel: It doesn't screw with your Microsoft Windows 7 windows. Multiwindow in Excel is just broken. Is Excel 2013 any better there?
Anyway, I agree with everything else you said, it matches exactly my experiences with Calc.
That being said I'd prefer Apple to push their iWorks applications over better OOffice - their technological basis is by far the best - the outcome of each click and each edit is completely predictable, the whole rendering engine works consistantly across all three products, so do hotkeys. They're just lacking a lot of sugar on top like the features you mention.
I much prefer libreoffice and gnumeric to excel. Last I looked, of the three only gnumeric could do colored scatter plots, though this was a while ago...
Writer is fine, Calc is somewhat ok for light spreadsheet users.
but
Presentations? That thing (whatever it's called) is just unusable IMO. Way too many clicks to do anything, crap looking standard templates, crap looking animations. Powerpoint completely blows it out of the water and let's beter not speak about Keynote.
So any manager / engineer / researcher probably won't be happy with LibreOffice, since presentations are just a fact of life and you need to be able to get them done quickly.
Funny you say that. I've moved my presentation workflow entirely to HTML5+JS. d3 is amazeballs and should be used at every available instance (and so is raphael)
In presentation to clients, I write reports/presentations per scenario/campaign. I use your bog standard Initializr+Bootstrap, the visualizations have been previsualized on ggplot, and then translated into d3 where it makes sense.
How long does it take? 2 - 5 days per report/preso. Like I said, it mayn't apply to everyone. I have the luxury of time.
I don't usually do the presentation (can't recall when I did one). Speaking in public (even to normal people on a non presenter basis) terrifies me
Oh. Ok. 2 days is actually at the high end of what I do, and this is for a 50min presentation. Of course, the visuals are usually based on work I already did before - instead of designing stuff with pen and paper I usually begin drawing my ideas directly in a quick Keynote presentation, that way I can show it to other people / at internal meetings easily.
I'd be interested to see one of your presentations though, in case they're not all confidential. I think your approach might make sense for product launches for example - where it needs to look even more professional than the junk I do. If you're interested I could also send you an example Keynote file if you have a mac, just to see the quality difference.
Unexpectedly, I moved away from PowerPoint without needing a PowerPoint clone. I started using prezi for fun, just because it's different and ended up taking all my presentations there. You have to be careful not to be too flashy, but it's a very cool application, if you can live with the lockin.
This rumor stems from a source in Brussels, Belgium, who spoke to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel at FOSDEM, one of Europe’s larger open source conferences. According to this source, who is presumably one of Microsoft’s open source developers, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014.
This is as thin as it gets for journalistic sources.
I wouldn't call most tech blogs these days "journalism". A journalist would at least put a little blurb in the story describing their attempt to contact Microsoft and corroborate the story.
This is a rumour that MS is taking a meaningful look at porting Office to Linux. All it takes is one OS exec to say "you're doing WHAT?!!!" and this meaningful look will be quietly stopped.
Even if they do port, I'd expect it to be broken in many ways, each popping up a "This wouldn't happen if you were running on Windows" dialog. MS just won't be able to help itself.
If true, I think this is good news both for Linux and for Office.
Just as an aside, I've installed Office 365 (the Office 2013 annual subscription program) and my tentative assessment is positive. I like the overall feel and functionality once you turn off animation. This evening, I found I really enjoyed the new alignment and drawing guides in Powerpoint 2013. They make Powerpoint a solid diagramming tool.
At $99/year for installation on five family PCs, the pricing is much more reasonable.
Why would Dia being open source and free make it a better diagramming tool? I am worried when those are the two main points you make as to why it would be better than Powerpoint (which I also use for diagramming, and find very smooth).
As much as I'd love to see this happen, there's no way it's going to.
Linux has what, maybe a 1-2% desktop market share? Can you even begin to image the support costs Microsoft would have to endure to make this happen?
Assuming the article isn't just link-bait, I have a feeling the "meaningful look" is really one guy in a cube somewhere who drafted a position paper that he is desperately peddling up the chain as far as he can go.
Microsoft has become the "Office and Exchange" company. They should just stop trying to sell OS's altogether and try to get Office onto as many platforms as possible as fast as possible.
If I were MS, I'd be giving away an XP like OS for free just so I'd have a way to get Office out there easier.
It does seem that Microsoft could still be massively profitable if they nearly gave away Windows for desktop while still charging for Office and Windows Server.
There'd be little incentive to pirate Windows if it only cost $25. If you want to monetize that further, sell support packages, offer a Backblaze-like backup service for a monthly subscription fee, and so on.
Apple has always sold the hardware and they never gave the OS away, until the new OS came bundled with an App Store which gives apple a 30% cut on each sale.
Actually, they cut the price to 29 prior to creating the mac app store. They sold snow leopard for $29 as well, citing its focus on performance/stability rather than new features, and the faster upgrade cycle. I believe the price change had more to do with switching to annual releases
Few people did, as there were few Mac users when the OS fit on on one or two floppies and enough Mac users to copy from others when it no longer did, but In the 80's, you could walk into a dealer with a bundle of floppies and get a copy of the latest OS release.
I think this is what they're leaning toward with their next iteration of Windows in Windows 9/Windows Blue or whatever they're going to call it. Desktop operating systems have become a commodity, but Microsoft still prices theirs like it's the mid 90s.
Haha this made me laugh :) First the notion that someone would pay to upgrade to Win8, then the price :D Even $40 would have been too much... Apparently they really want everyone switch to Linux.
Emphasis on XP-like. XP itself isn't all that viable anymore, enough time goes by and it is like you are trying to stop the Titanic from going down with duct-tape.
The way I see it Microsoft may become the next IBM. IBM was a mainframe and "business machines" company until it saw it's market share falling and share price stagnate. That all changed in 1993 when massive layoffs set the groundwork for the reinvention of IBM as a solutions company. Like IBM, they have a massive network and talent base on which to draw from. I predict that Microsoft's cash cow shrink-wrap licensing revenue will start to give way to other revenue streams which may prove more lucrative long term.
It could be timed for the end of life for windows xp in April 2014. Its still a large chunk of the installed os base
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
So maybe the point is that if you can't keep everyone of these on windows at least you can keep them using office.
I think this would be great because it would really let people use what they want. Office is good at what it does. There are lots of people who run Linux who could benefit from it. If you're not one of those people and Google Docs or LibreOffice works for you, that's fine you can keep using that. And from Microsoft's point of view, allowing more users to have access to Office makes setting up a Microsoft ecosystem an easier sell for a company. There is plenty of expensive enterprise software to be sold to companies that ties into Office. If companies can buy it without worrying about forcing an OS change for employees who are already productive with their current setup, that makes for an easier sale for MS.
Why? Like the article pointed out, there can't be a very large market for it. LibreOffice is free, not to mention the increasing trend toward cloud-base office suites, including Office. Unless the crossover from an Android version really isn't that extensive I can't see the point. All it would potentially do is pull more people off Windows.
On the other hand, I've heard it said that MS actually loses money on Windows. Their real cash cow is Office and other software suites. So who knows, maybe they have a tentative long term strategy of downplaying OS competition and focusing on business applications.
This is the first move by Microsoft that I can actually understand. They need to seriously rethink what their goals are. They can't have the computing monopoly they used to, so they really need to focus on what they're strong at: corporate software. And that is not a bad thing.
How about marketing Surface as a solution to corporate IT departments trying to wrestle iPads into their Microsoft ecosystem? Windows Phone could be the same. They could be the Blackberry of the new mobile corporate strategies. Then just keep doing what they do best: build products that plug and play very, very nicely with the rest of Microsoft's portfolio, and offer better corporate support for those products.
Instead of trying to figure out how to make a slicker Metro, how about making Sharepoint suck less? Keep the direction of VS going forward. Microsoft's "next big things" should be focused on innovating the corporate workspace. Stop trying to get tangled up in the Apple/Google wars and start focusing on challenging things like Google Docs, Box, and Red Hat instead. Those are Microsoft's real competitors.
It seems like they're very conflicted and confused about who they are supposed to be. They're not the cool new unproven software maker. They're the people whose products you use when you want to reduce IT costs and modernize legacy application portfolios.
Microsoft cannot afford the possibility another office suite (or another component) gains a foothold in the market. The moment that happens, the moment the market fragments around a different standard (even more if it's a cross-platform/cross-device standard), the mutual Windows-Office reinforcement collapses and each side has to fight on its own.
Microsoft markets Office for Macs for two reasons: because it makes some money out of it and because it prevents a competitor from appearing and taking over the Mac side of the ecosystem and threatening crossing over to Windows. The same reasoning applies to Linux - if Linux ever becomes a significant corporate desktop OS and LibreOffice becomes a threat to Office, Microsoft's value proposition starts to be questioned. Offering a reasonable migration path for companies moving segments of their park away from Windows to stay reinforcing Office as a de-facto standard is vital.
At my employer, we use Outlook for mail and calendaring. Currently I have to remote desktop into a server to use Outlook or run a Windows VM on my Linux workstation. If MS releases this, my company can simply license Office for Linux and we can access it "natively" (modulo it'll be a closed-source binary). There is a market for this, if small.
Having looked at parts of the Office source I would be extremely surprised if this is anything but a statement to placate OSS devs. The sheer amount of effort required to port Office to Linux would be a few orders of magnitude greater than any sales that could possibly be achieved from Linux users.
They've been able to port various Windows-centric products to other platforms before (to Mac and Solaris at least). Exchange, Office, Internet Explorer etc.
I agree they won't make a huge profit from it directly but I bet it's a good counter-argument to "let's standardise on OpenOffice since otherwise we are subject to MS vendor lock-in". A couple of big government or corporate deals should cover the costs.
A much better idea would be to write a universal set of software for every platform, in the least amount of code possible, using the most powerful language, and increasing the amount of features in line with what users want.
Where would such a mythical piece of software exist? On Microsoft's servers. It would be cloud tech, accessible from any platform, and would be far superior to any port Microsoft will cook up for 2014.
The only foreseeable downside to this is lack of internet translating to lack of office productivity. But in almost every scenario I think that obstacle is overstated.
That's the future of the office suite, not wasting money and effort doing market research and porting code from Windows to Linux (I can recall a handful of times that has worked natively).
I attended a Microsoft conference back in 2001 or 2002 and during a Q&A with the audience someone asked if Microsoft would ever release a version of Office for Linux. He basically said if the demand was there, they would do it, because they were a software company.
Office is great and all, but I transitioned to Google Docs a long time ago. The one thing holding me back from Linux as my day-to-day operating system is lack of Adobe software. The day Photoshop and Fireworks comes to Linux (heck, the whole entire Creative Suite) I'll jump the Windows ship so fast. If true, this is a smart move for Microsoft because if the tide changes, Microsoft would already have a foothold because open source equivalents of MS Office just aren't as good as Microsoft's offering. When was the last time you ever saw a business using OpenOffice over Microsoft Office? Never.
I like Google Docs, but, I find that it is nowhere near the "quality" (well, maybe just features) of Microsoft Word. In fact, I don't think it is even meant to be.
I for one would do fine on Google Docs, but, there are many for whom that would not work.
I wonder how many is many. Of all the people out there using MS Office, what percentage of them could do their job just as well if not better with Google Docs, bearing in mind the advantages of an online suite such as collaboration and sharing.
I wonder if the majority of MS Office users are just unaware of the alternatives or nervous about learning a new application.
Office coming to Linux? What? Really?! open article... "This rumor stems from a source in Brussels, Belgium, who spoke to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel at FOSDEM" , "oh , right then" close tab
To do this they'd need to basically implement the Win32 APIs on Linux. And if they did that, that might enable other windows applications to run on desktop Linux. It would be similar to how WINE works, but by Microsoft.
Eh, it's not like porting to Android has any bearing on porting to desktop Linux since the UI toolkits are completely different. I guess this would be cool, but I'd be surprised if many people used it over LibreOffice.
That's what I was thinking. On the other hand, Microsoft has already ported some of the functionality to JavaScript to make Office 365 -- maybe they could offer cross-platform support via an Office 365 client that could run offline? It would still be a far cry from Office on Linux/Android.
Because I'm CS student I already get Windows for free through dreamspark, but I don't think I get MS Office. I'm assuming MS is making a big chunk of their profit from all the college freshmen buying Office every year. In my public speech class I gave a presentation about why people should use FOSS. When I mentioned Libre Office in the presentation, and how it could open and write .docx people's mouths dropped. Multiple people including my professor asked about Libre Office after the presentation.
I think Microsoft may generally be worried about the future of Office, or they're hubristic about it.
Desktop Linux biggest problem is bad software. LibreOffice is great, but it's still 10 years behind Office. GIMP is a joke. NetBeans and Aptana fantastic but come nowhere near the visual studio or xcode.
It's a shame because some Linux distros make Mac OS X and Windows look like a joke. Have you tried http://elementaryos.org/? it's like warm pillow on a cold night. A brilliant example of UI done right.
I'm excited to see Steam come to Linux. If Office were to come, it Desktop Linux has a bright future.
"Transforming from a software-maker to a devices and services company requires us to make big, bold bets and push our business in new directions." -- Ballmer on Office 365 launch last week
Look for Microsoft to try to squash those in open source who are already nicely serving up quality office products without charge. Could this be why Oracle stopped working to develop Open Office (who btw allowed you to not only open but also save in MS Office file formats)? Did they know something about this that we didn't know? What happened with Open Office did not pass the smell test. Perhaps this is why. Hopefully, Apache can revive the efforts and get things moving forward again with Open Office.
For me, standard "offline" Office suites are really "things of the previous millenium". MS Office or Libre/OpenOffice alike.
I use Google Docs for everything. It's simpler to use, it's simpler to share documents, it's inherently more mobile. The updates are instant. And so on.
Now I would be glad if there was free (as-in-speech) alternative to Google Docs, so I could just host it myself on my server. There IS etherpad, but it doesn't do tables and works slightly differently.
What do others think? Are "offline" office suites still relevant?
I got bitten by this problem once: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/t7MZYkHnL... . Essentially, one fine day, google docs couldn't draw a scatter-plot that connected the plotted points with a line (the feature got removed for some reason). From the timeline of that thread, it took months to get the feature back. This is just unacceptable. Ever since, I have decided to stick with a native app for office software (excel on win + mac and some other stuff for Linux).
As a complete convert to Google Docs I say largely irrelevant.
The reality for me (and I'd imagine a large chunk of computer using population) is that I very rarely need all the features of Excel and Word to do my job, so the benefits of an online suite (collaboration, sharing etc) outweigh the lost features.
I envisage Word becoming more of a publishing application for those few people in a company who need to make publishable documents. The rest of us will survive with only ~16 fonts.
Absolutely. The alternatives -- OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Docs -- are all broken in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, especially if you're a long-time Office power user.
There really is nothing comparable to the Office suite when it comes to features and interoperability. Yes, it has its quirks, but you just can't make the other products do what the Office products can do.
In our company we don't use office at all. We only use LibreOffice - it's not as good,but it's completely fine for doing spreadsheets and basic text documents. Honestly, I don't see the need to spend money on the full Office suite.
However, we still use Windows - why?
Not because of Office - but because the only proper accounting suite available in this country runs only on Windows,and it's server can only use MSSQL as the database. Therefore, we have to use Windows as a company, even without Office.
There's even a certificate called ICDL (and updated MOS) from Microsoft that is required for every student in our college to get in order to graduate. It sucks really. The most useless certificate for a student to bet money and time on.
This is great news for Linux users everywhere and basically to anyone who has tried to convince casual users to switch.
But to MSFT this is suicide: even if Office remains the leading suite with a Linux version every company out there can save millions a year switching to a distro and paying only for Office, but not for Windows.
This is basically Nintendo giving away Mario and Zelda to other consoles.
Do any of the newer divisions at MSFT make any money? Xbox probably but there is no way Winphone and web are bringing any cash.
Microsoft should release their own Linux distribution along with it. Imagine how attractive that might be: a version of Linux, with support contracts, that is guaranteed to work with Microsoft Office.
The only drawback, of course, is that it would weaken the need for Windows itself. But, given the disasters that have been Vista and Windows 8, maybe they should look at long term survival rather than tying themselves to that particular anchor?
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if Sinofsky's firing had something to do with him not agreeing with this decision. Seeing as a key selling point for the Surface over the iPad is the inclusion of Office, and the Surface was Sinofsky's baby, I imagine he wouldn't like this decision at all. That, and one of the reasons Ballmer cited for Sinofsky leaving was his lack of cooperation with other senior leadership.
That day may still never come. Seems like a rumor at this point, and consider the source-- Phoronix is well known in the Linux press for hyping rumors.
>because Microsoft is reportedly already working on Office for Android. Android, as you may already know, is a Linux-based operating system, meaning a lot of the porting work will have already been done
Well, I thought linux just bases the kernel of the operating system(Android), in which case porting Microsoft Office has nothing to do with porting to desktop linus, unless it's written in C :)
Preemptive crippling strike against Open Office and company?
To my knowledge, Office is one of their main profit centers, to the point of Windows being a deliver platform for Office. So, I could see cannibalizing some Windows sales to boost Office.
Now that they're on ARM, their office efforts probably shift to make it ubiquitous on every platform - even exploring the iOS/RIM options. Thus, the entire office team may have a different perspective now... creating a very different approach to development, etc.
The odds of governments or major corporations, M$'s biggest customers, switching from windows to linux are virtually nil. Institutions are heavily invested with Microsoft, linux Office won't be the tipping point for a switch to a whole new technology stack.
The Microsoft of today has nothing to lose from this. 20 years ago the situation was different. A must-have app like Office was all that was keeping people from switching to a wide variety of competing OSes. But it's 2013 and the battle has been won. For all the hate that people heap upon Microsoft, they dominate the most profitable sector of the personal computing market. Their strategic position doesn't depend on any one piece of software.
If anything, I think this move demonstrates how confident they are. In the past Office for linux would have been confounding, for both business and ideological reasons. This is the tech company version of dismantling the ICBMS. The OS cold war is over, and everyone can go back to business.
I hope they bundle outlook too. Outlook is the main reason i am still using my macbook and windows. Even i do most of my work on Linux, i need to communicate with others through outlook.Actually having outlook on Linux is good enough.
Microsoft Office is the last obstacle preventing my wife (and my mother coincidently) from moving to Linux. They both tried Ubuntu, liked it, but Windows VM just for office was PITA. And they switched back because of the office suite.
It is not strengthening Linux based operating systems that they have to worry about. It is the obsolesence of office in the hands of better cross platform suites that can be a bigger problem.
I read something like this and think... really MS should follow in Apple's footsteps and build their new OS on the linux kernel, as Apple built their's on the FreeBSD kernel... It could work
Unless Microsoft is prepared to invest a lot of money and time in preserving backwards compatibility with existing Windows applications, I can't see it being met with anything but resistance.
Even if they want to be on other platforms, how is Linux a good place to start? Wouldn't iOS or android be more logical? Unless they already have that going...
Is it me, or are more and more things coming to Linux nowadays? Might Android's success and Linux' good and early ARM support have something to do with it?
Can't Linux users already use Office360? I was under the impression that Office360 was the future. That Microsoft was slowing moving their office software into the cloud?
Supporting Linux seems pointless. Linux has a really small market share. I am fairly sure a lot of Linux users who are tech savvy would want to support the open source Libre Office instead of forking out for MS Office.
Better places to expand would be Android / iOS app stores. Tablet devices are still exploding in growth. I could see a lot of use being got out of office software on tablets.
I can't fully understand why I find this so funny but I am just falling out of my seat laughing.
While I find this extremely comical, I am excited to see the consequences of this for desktop linux. The way I see it, the more people who use linux the better it will become :).
Since this is HN you shouldmprobably provide some counternargument, since I agree with you, here's two: 2% is a massive overestimation of desktop Linux market share, Microsoft doesn't want to fragment the existing diminishing desktop computing base, and would probably spend more effort working ona touch/voice version of Office because it would see better returns.
But Office, especially with its growing Web and sharing underpinnings, may be a more enduring product than Windows. If this is indeed the case, it makes sense for Office to be on every platform possible, making it the standard for document creation and sharing.
Microsoft is weak in the smartphone and tablet space. It makes a ton of sense for Office to go here; it's not like strong Office products on iOS would hurt Surface sales. And now with subscription plans and Windows becoming less ubiquitous, why not Linux?
It's not Office's job to protect Windows, especially if Windows can't protect Office. If Office doesn't go on more platforms, people will switch to other solutions because they are using non-Windows devices all the time. Windows alone will kill Office in the long term.