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> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason t

> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did. Windows is still overwhelmingly strong in the desktop market, though, so they have no such incentive to accommodate it there. Nobody retreats from a battlefield they've already won.

at-fates-hands 7y ago
> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. I would also add in there are other open source options that are compatible and work well with MS Office now. Libre Office and Open Office are two such examples. I can now write my resume in either or and save it in a docx format, send it to a recruiter and then they can open it with MS Word without any issues.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  errr... I would still export it as PDF first. I wouldn't trust something as important as a job application to work perfectly. (I'm a Libre Office user on Windows. )
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The bigger competitor for Word and the rest of the office suite is not Libre or Open Office but Google Docs. It's cross platform and does away with local file storage, which is a security risk and a data loss risk.
  - at-fates-hands 7y ago
    Good call. I haven't used Google Docs in a long time and had forgotten about them.
  - bakuninsbart 7y ago
    The only thing they NEED to improve is version history comparison. I do not understand why it is so hard to "save" a version of a file before you make your own changes, so that others then can easily see what you changed.
- innocenat 7y ago
  Yeah, until you encountered complex script and East Asian script. As a Linux user I still maintain a Windows VM precisely for MS Office. On Linux, WPS Office is much better at handling these scripts though.
jabits 7y ago
Vanishingly small...the Linux community are usually fan-faring increases in usage on a fractional part of a percentage increase, ~ 2%. And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? And as a shareholder, I would not want them to waste the money at this point...
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  > ~ 2%. 2% of the human population are 154 million people. Sure, not everyone has a computer, so let's say 66 million people, this is the population of France. > There are many, which one would they port to? You don't actually need to support a specific desktop environment. Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc
  - curt15 7y ago
    >Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc But which versions of which libraries do you target? Every distribution has its own menagerie. There is no well-defined "Linux platform" like there is with Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/).
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Core libraries like glibc and Xlib are pretty well defined. You need to ship your own copy of the widget library of choice, but that isn't a big deal. You could even ship an Xlib copy and rely on the fact that there is an X server speaking the same protocol. It's all perhaps a bit messy, but it works.
    - dependenttypes 7y ago
      Just static link? Or do what windows software does, so ship dynamic libraries with your application. I do not see the issue. > There is no well-defined "Linux platform" There actually is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
8bitsrule 7y ago
>the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The market for Beethoven is also too small to be worth considering. What does the market know?
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Would it be too crazy to think Microsoft could one day adopt Linux as their core for their OS though? They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro much like Wine does (but much better and from scratch) and keep those portions proprietary. This allows their OS to run on more platforms than Windows ever has. Much like how Edge is now Chromium based. Nothing is stopping them from making Linux server distros either since they do produce SQL Server for Linux as it is. They ported a lot of VS code to Mac (not it isnt just MonoDevelop) and were surprised by how much just worked due to the OO design. Microsoft is embedding the Linux kernel already. Whats next? A linux friendly file system? Things are going to get interesting overtime. I have no knowledge of what they are up to truly just a bit of speculation. But given what has happened in the last decade that is "not Microsofts MO" none of this would surprise me.
- oaiey 7y ago
  That is crazy. Because NT is an excellent kernel done by a industry legend (David Cutler). It runs on 80%+ of all desktop, is the grid below a cloud platform, is a game console and has a track record of being flexible enough to run on microcontrollers, phones, etc. And the complete hardware industry supports it. There is no reason to switch to Linux, considering that they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper.
  - tomxor 7y ago
    > they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. MacOS X is not based on Linux or GNU and it's UI evolved out of a combination of Next technology and features combined with re-implemented classic Mac OS features. So it wasn't exactly a clean slate. More relevantly though, they put some effort into maintaining compatibility with programs written for their previous OS by both porting their APIs and providing CPU emulation! And that is on top of bringing the rest of nextstep up to standard for what consumers were expecting out of a desktop OS at the time. > Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper. I doubt it, Microsoft can and has rewritten their UI multiple times... if they wanted to, they could write it for Linux atop their own ported windows API with little effort. I think they just lack the incentive to do so, Linux users wont care because they wont use it, Windows users wont care because they don't care about Linux... who will benefit? not Microsoft that's for sure. From a business perspective MS behavior makes sense, they are embracing Linux because that's the way one half of the market is headed whether they like it or not... meanwhile their desktop business still has a hold on the market mostly out of inertia and legacy, so why would they do something as radical as change the core OS to mess that up? However as the parent said "one day", maybe, in the future, when windows makes zero sense to run on metal, then perhaps microsoft will create an official and FOSS windows API... if only to relieve themselves from security support hell.
SiVal 7y ago
the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering Yes, and the market for NeXT software was likewise until Apple decided to put it under a Mac shell. In fact, NT was the same until MS put it under a Windows shell. They could do it again, put Windows on a Linux kernel with a multiyear transition strategy and have the consumer and producer clients with the closest integration with Linux servers.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Microsoft have an established track record of offering, then withdrawing, MS Office for alternate platforms (or refusing to offer it at all). I seem to recall that there was an Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris, which is 99.99...% of the way to a Linux variant. That was killed. (This may have been MSIE or an Exchange-compatible email client, I'm researching this still.) OSX is better supported, though for a long time Microsoft's email client was not Outlook but Entourage, a now-discontinued project. It had a typical-for-Microsoft opaque binary data storage format, though it's proved possible to extract useful information from this using Linux utilities. Microsoft discontinued MSIE support on Mac in 2005, an issue given that many enterprise Web / intranet tools relied exclusively on nonstandard MSIE web extensions. Office was never offered for BeOS, which I believe was a deliberate strategy decision, though I'm not finding evidence of this (JLG should be able to comment, if anyone has current contact). The lack was seen as a kiss-of-death for the OS and hardware. Alternatively, what made RIM's Blackberry as popular among business executives as it was was its integration with MS Exchange email servers. Strategic control over what ports were and were not supported by Microsoft, regardless of technical difficulty or merits, was a major element of that company's monopoly abuses.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >an [MS] Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris // Are you sure you're not thinking of StarOffice, which became OpenOffice.org which begat LibreOffice. That was Sun's answer to MS Office, supposedly started by realising it was cheaper to buy a company that made an office suite and develop it in-house than it was to pay MS for their suite.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I'm positive it wasn't Staroffice. I know that story ... painfully ... well. It might not have been MS office, but MSIE or a specific application. I'm finding researching this online disappointingly fruitless, though I've got inquiries in a few spots.
    - IcePic 7y ago
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. // If MS Office were available for Linux the market for Linux applications would grow, massively IMO (assuming it worked properly). Which is of course a reason MS wouldn't do that, because why move MS Office users to Linux when you're currently selling $Billions of OS to people who only want to use MS Office.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Increasingly people don't care about productivity suites running locally. Office 365 and Gsuite work just fine with Linux.
zarkov99 7y ago
Linux is also much more popular for developers. WSL is a very well executed strategy to keep developers on Windows.
gerbilly 7y ago
> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. And that is because office and other major applications aren't available on linux.
- denkmoon 7y ago
  So it's a chicken and egg problem. I wouldn't "go first" if I were Microsoft, no reason to accelerate the obsolescence of windows desktop. Why not let eg. Adobe go first?
jacob019 7y ago
I work in an Industrious co-working space in Indianapolis. As I walk around the office and see people's monitors, it appears that about 30% of people are running Ubuntu. Edit: Query re downvote, too subjective?

at-fates-hands 7y ago

> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. I would also add in there are other open source options that are compatible and work well with MS Office now. Libre Office and Open Office are two such examples. I can now write my resume in either or and save it in a docx format, send it to a recruiter and then they can open it with MS Word without any issues.

jay_kyburz 7y ago
errr... I would still export it as PDF first. I wouldn't trust something as important as a job application to work perfectly. (I'm a Libre Office user on Windows. )
jacquesm 7y ago
The bigger competitor for Word and the rest of the office suite is not Libre or Open Office but Google Docs. It's cross platform and does away with local file storage, which is a security risk and a data loss risk.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  Good call. I haven't used Google Docs in a long time and had forgotten about them.
- bakuninsbart 7y ago
  The only thing they NEED to improve is version history comparison. I do not understand why it is so hard to "save" a version of a file before you make your own changes, so that others then can easily see what you changed.
innocenat 7y ago
Yeah, until you encountered complex script and East Asian script. As a Linux user I still maintain a Windows VM precisely for MS Office. On Linux, WPS Office is much better at handling these scripts though.

jabits 7y ago

Vanishingly small...the Linux community are usually fan-faring increases in usage on a fractional part of a percentage increase, ~ 2%. And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? And as a shareholder, I would not want them to waste the money at this point...

dependenttypes 7y ago
> ~ 2%. 2% of the human population are 154 million people. Sure, not everyone has a computer, so let's say 66 million people, this is the population of France. > There are many, which one would they port to? You don't actually need to support a specific desktop environment. Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc
- curt15 7y ago
  >Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc But which versions of which libraries do you target? Every distribution has its own menagerie. There is no well-defined "Linux platform" like there is with Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/).
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Core libraries like glibc and Xlib are pretty well defined. You need to ship your own copy of the widget library of choice, but that isn't a big deal. You could even ship an Xlib copy and rely on the fact that there is an X server speaking the same protocol. It's all perhaps a bit messy, but it works.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    Just static link? Or do what windows software does, so ship dynamic libraries with your application. I do not see the issue. > There is no well-defined "Linux platform" There actually is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base

8bitsrule 7y ago

>the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The market for Beethoven is also too small to be worth considering. What does the market know?

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Would it be too crazy to think Microsoft could one day adopt Linux as their core for their OS though? They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro much like Wine does (but much better and from scratch) and keep those portions proprietary. This allows their OS to run on more platforms than Windows ever has. Much like how Edge is now Chromium based. Nothing is stopping them from making Linux server distros either since they do produce SQL Server for Linux as it is. They ported a lot of VS code to Mac (not it isnt just MonoDevelop) and were surprised by how much just worked due to the OO design. Microsoft is embedding the Linux kernel already. Whats next? A linux friendly file system? Things are going to get interesting overtime. I have no knowledge of what they are up to truly just a bit of speculation. But given what has happened in the last decade that is "not Microsofts MO" none of this would surprise me.

oaiey 7y ago
That is crazy. Because NT is an excellent kernel done by a industry legend (David Cutler). It runs on 80%+ of all desktop, is the grid below a cloud platform, is a game console and has a track record of being flexible enough to run on microcontrollers, phones, etc. And the complete hardware industry supports it. There is no reason to switch to Linux, considering that they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper.
- tomxor 7y ago
  > they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. MacOS X is not based on Linux or GNU and it's UI evolved out of a combination of Next technology and features combined with re-implemented classic Mac OS features. So it wasn't exactly a clean slate. More relevantly though, they put some effort into maintaining compatibility with programs written for their previous OS by both porting their APIs and providing CPU emulation! And that is on top of bringing the rest of nextstep up to standard for what consumers were expecting out of a desktop OS at the time. > Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper. I doubt it, Microsoft can and has rewritten their UI multiple times... if they wanted to, they could write it for Linux atop their own ported windows API with little effort. I think they just lack the incentive to do so, Linux users wont care because they wont use it, Windows users wont care because they don't care about Linux... who will benefit? not Microsoft that's for sure. From a business perspective MS behavior makes sense, they are embracing Linux because that's the way one half of the market is headed whether they like it or not... meanwhile their desktop business still has a hold on the market mostly out of inertia and legacy, so why would they do something as radical as change the core OS to mess that up? However as the parent said "one day", maybe, in the future, when windows makes zero sense to run on metal, then perhaps microsoft will create an official and FOSS windows API... if only to relieve themselves from security support hell.

SiVal 7y ago

the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering Yes, and the market for NeXT software was likewise until Apple decided to put it under a Mac shell. In fact, NT was the same until MS put it under a Windows shell. They could do it again, put Windows on a Linux kernel with a multiyear transition strategy and have the consumer and producer clients with the closest integration with Linux servers.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Microsoft have an established track record of offering, then withdrawing, MS Office for alternate platforms (or refusing to offer it at all). I seem to recall that there was an Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris, which is 99.99...% of the way to a Linux variant. That was killed. (This may have been MSIE or an Exchange-compatible email client, I'm researching this still.) OSX is better supported, though for a long time Microsoft's email client was not Outlook but Entourage, a now-discontinued project. It had a typical-for-Microsoft opaque binary data storage format, though it's proved possible to extract useful information from this using Linux utilities. Microsoft discontinued MSIE support on Mac in 2005, an issue given that many enterprise Web / intranet tools relied exclusively on nonstandard MSIE web extensions. Office was never offered for BeOS, which I believe was a deliberate strategy decision, though I'm not finding evidence of this (JLG should be able to comment, if anyone has current contact). The lack was seen as a kiss-of-death for the OS and hardware. Alternatively, what made RIM's Blackberry as popular among business executives as it was was its integration with MS Exchange email servers. Strategic control over what ports were and were not supported by Microsoft, regardless of technical difficulty or merits, was a major element of that company's monopoly abuses.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>an [MS] Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris // Are you sure you're not thinking of StarOffice, which became OpenOffice.org which begat LibreOffice. That was Sun's answer to MS Office, supposedly started by realising it was cheaper to buy a company that made an office suite and develop it in-house than it was to pay MS for their suite.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I'm positive it wasn't Staroffice. I know that story ... painfully ... well. It might not have been MS office, but MSIE or a specific application. I'm finding researching this online disappointingly fruitless, though I've got inquiries in a few spots.
  - IcePic 7y ago

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

>Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. // If MS Office were available for Linux the market for Linux applications would grow, massively IMO (assuming it worked properly). Which is of course a reason MS wouldn't do that, because why move MS Office users to Linux when you're currently selling $Billions of OS to people who only want to use MS Office.

ghaff 7y ago
Increasingly people don't care about productivity suites running locally. Office 365 and Gsuite work just fine with Linux.

zarkov99 7y ago

Linux is also much more popular for developers. WSL is a very well executed strategy to keep developers on Windows.

gerbilly 7y ago

> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. And that is because office and other major applications aren't available on linux.

denkmoon 7y ago
So it's a chicken and egg problem. I wouldn't "go first" if I were Microsoft, no reason to accelerate the obsolescence of windows desktop. Why not let eg. Adobe go first?

jacob019 7y ago

I work in an Industrious co-working space in Indianapolis. As I walk around the office and see people's monitors, it appears that about 30% of people are running Ubuntu. Edit: Query re downvote, too subjective?