In DetikInet, i saw a news which stated that Microsoft is predicted to start working on Microsoft Office which runs on GNU/Linux platform in the next two years. IMHO, i'm quite agreed with this. Microsoft Office is one of their biggest product and it gaves a lot of revenue to Microsoft. I'm not sure whether they want to make it running on GNU/Linux platform, as they will lose alot of money from Microsoft Office itself.
Besides, Microsoft uses their own proprietary format which limits many people when they want to open other product to open their own files, such as OpenOffice.org even they had created odf-converter to convert between each files. I don't think many people who have used to work with OOo will like this idea, unless Microsoft is willing to use OpenDocument Format as their default format.
Other problem is that Microsoft Office is very close with Windows and it will make interoperability is very hard to be done even with optimized Wine, just like Picasa. You will have an instable product or inconsistent product. But, if Microsoft is willing to do so, then it surely a good news. Let's just wait and see for the next big issue :D
Nah... Microsoft is loosing their focus. It seems that, they want to eat all cakes.
ReplyDeleteThey saw Google doing great, and they start MSN. They saw Sun doing fun, and they start .NET.
Now they're worried about OpenOffice, ans they star invest in GTK also?
We're witnessing a big company about to fail to fulfill its focus (how many times they've delayed Vista?) because they want to start fighting all enemies at once.
other possibilities, they don't wont their title as the biggest software company grabbed by IBM or SUN :D
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft using GTK? Hm.. interesting, but it will be a major downgrade on the interface section huh ??
Yes, if you see my previous post, there's a picture which stated all Microsoft's rivals :D
Andry, if you were on top and you see there are big chunks of market unoccupied, would you sit down and watch other people to grab that chunks?
ReplyDeleteGoogle isn't the only player in the Internet (as a platform). MSN isn't doing bad anyway; it gives Microsoft another source of revenue (around USD$ 800 millions AFAIK).
What is wrong with .NET? It's much better than COM/COM+/DCOM/MFC. Would you want to code in C# with WinForms (and future WPF/XAML) or you want to handle those HWND? SUN isn't the only player in "all-platform" language anyway. In fact, SWING is not suitable for GUI development, J2EE is proven to be overkill and bloated.
Is Vista a big failure? maybe. I work in a software company providing 3D solutions for US Army, Navy, DoD, Canadian Armies and alike. Our sales people have told the developers several US Army schools will deploy Vista when it comes out. I'm sure Microsoft have signed agreements with several enterprise companies to deploy Vista at their offices. Sales wise the number is there for Microsoft; they are selling their software despite the questionable quality of Vista.
I was shallow like you before, thinking Microsoft sucks because of the delays.
But try to see the bigger picture: Vista codebase for 10 years and several version of Vista to be delivered every 2 years from the initial release.
Windows 95/98/98SE/ME were built on top of Windows 3.0/3.1/95 codebase.
Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3 were built on top of Windows NT codebase. Vista is built on top of Windows 2K3 (parts of it).
Try to imagine Vista v1 (2007), Vista v2 (2009), Vista v3 (2011). All of them will be build on top of Vista v1. That's money with less effort. That's what software engineers called software reuse.
Please do not take detik.com articles seriously ^_^. Often I caught the journalists (or writers or editors) were interpreting english-written articles poorly.
Basically the article said someone from OSDL "guessing" Microsoft will release Office for Linux in the future. It could happen via .NET. If Microsoft Office is written in .NET (which I'm sure some parts of it have been written in .NET for Office 2007) all Microsoft have to do is to port .NET to Office all of them. (I know there is Mono, but it is not a complete project).
I don't see them porting this to Linux. The case here is different with Microsoft Office for Mac. Office Mac has been around longer ever since Word version 5 or something (correct me if I'm wrong).
Will Microsoft lose money for porting Office to Linux? Last time when Microsoft representatives came to my Comp Sci department to give talks about their company, they mentioned the profits of Microsoft. The current biggest profit goes to Office followed by Windows. Their loses is only in XBOX for every unit they sold (understandable because they just want to put their feet on the market owned by Sony).
Will porting Office to Linux decrease Microsoft revenue? Probably by a very tiny margin in Windows division. But as in Office for Mac, don't expect VBA like interface or program your Office in Linux.
My company is in Windows ecosystem and Office cannot be replaced by OpenOffice. OpenOffice is not ready for enterprise ecosystem.