Ballmer's emotional farewell to Redmond: I LOVE THIS COMPANY Microsoft's 99,000 employees face a future without its chief chair-flinger Steve Ballmer who just announced his retirement to a happy Wall Street. He penned a letter to MS staff that was stuffed with classic Ballmerisms, including a repeat of one of his famously sweaty outpourings: "I LOVE THIS COMPANY." Ballmer joined …
Wouldn't it be great if the next brilliant leader decided to allow some of MS's products to interoperate with other systems - like Office for LInux, or Office for Chromebook? I know Office has been available for Mac for years, but when you consider that at one time MS was propping up Apple with cash infusions in order to avoid additional anti-trust hits, that's not so surprising.
But - Office for Linux, or Office for Chrome - those would be big changes.
Office 365 properly supported on all browsers, that'd be a big change. Porting Office to a number of different OSs would be a big cultural change, but to go forward technically you need to decouple from the OS, not bind to more. IMHO, obv....
We run Office 365 here. The web apps in Firefox on Linux are actually very good. I can do all of the Office 365 management from Linux. Funny thing is that even on Windows the webapps and management all works better in Firefox than IE 9 or 10.
What i'd truly like to see is Microsoft Linux would probably be the boldest move any Microsoft new top dog could ever do and i wonder if they just couldn't make a fortune doing it .. hmm must be the beer .. but still ..
nightmarish visions .. ? hmm .. better get heavily loaded with suds . And not a word to Microsoft .. we don't want them to have good ideas LOL
"But - Office for Linux..."
Thanks, but no thanks.
What do we want with a ribbonised, proprietary piece of junk like Office? When we already have LibreOffice and its like.
For the tiny minority of users who need all the esoteric bits of Office it would be better to stay with Windows. For everyone else it's a case of you pays your money and puts up with all of MS's antics re. format(OOXML), UI (think of TIFKAM) or use the free, libre software such as LO.
@nematoad - >"What do we want with a ribbonised, proprietary piece of junk like Office? When we already have LibreOffice and its like."
There are many of us who contract with a large sphere of businesses, and have to deal with MS Office formatted files on a daily basis. LO and OOo still don't offer a high enough percentage of correct formatting for complex MS formatted files. It would be nice to deal with these files without having to run two computers, or dual boot, or run Windows in a VM.
You have made my point perfectly.
"There are many of us who contract with a large sphere of businesses, and have to deal with MS Office formatted files on a daily basis."
That's why we need things like ODF so that people can be freed from lock-in.
MS know this and tried to force their vision of it on everyone via the ISO shenanigans over OOXML. Trouble was MS wanted to have the penny and the bun. Have a common format that everyone would use, BUT it had to be MS's common format so as to ensure that people locked into the Office ecosystem could never escape. Luckily they seem to have failed in this due to the muddled, half-baked specification that they managed to ram through the ISO process. Personally I can't think of any FULL implementation of OOXML, other than Office 2013.
The bottom line is that MS needs to retain the cash-cow that is Office despite the cost and inconvenience to the everyone else.
@ Andy - I don’t know if you noticed but MS office seriously miss-handles a lot of early MS Office stuff nowadays.
And its actually very easy to run Windows in a VM and have an office script automatically convert all the incoming legacy documentation into something safe - no need to ever look at the vm apart from usual windows maintenance.
If your worried about format changes you can even do automated comparisons of the two formats and then get someone to look at at any significant differences. Did this for a company a few years back and there was rarely anything of significance - though of course it does miss the fact Office incorrectly formats some early stuff - but that normally works in LO and OOo anyway.
"What do we want with a ribbonised, proprietary piece of junk like Office? When we already have LibreOffice and its like."
Because the most lucrative use of MS Office is for Excel running macros, which Libre Office and its 'document editor' ilk just don't do.
Cut your nose off to spite your face why don't you....
Wouldn't it be great if the next brilliant leader decided to allow some of MS's products to interoperate with other systems - like Office for LInux, or Office for Chromebook?
Eventually, yes, but right now I think he has much bigger fish to fry.
Linux is nice, but for Microsoft its still somewhat of a niche market, especially when looking at the desktop.
Quite frankly I think the new CEO should start by reversing some of the recent braindead decisions which have really managed to piss people off. Like, for example, ditching TechNet. Or, ironically enough after that "developers" rant, seeing thousands of developers get plain out ignored when they criticized the latest Visual Studio. Not merely bashing; also making it very clear why they wouldn't upgrade as well as sharing what they thought needed to be changed.
For starters they need to start focussing on their customers and what these people really want. Because that's where the money is coming from!
@Andy Prough
On the day when the typical Linux user pays for applications, rather than ranting endlessly about how the free (as in beer) equivalents are just as good if not better even when they blatantly aren't*, that might happen. Until then, you've a snowballs chance in hell of seeing Office for Linux.
*See every discussion on Photoshop vs GIMP ever for example
On the day when the typical Linux user pays for applications...
I know it's games rather than general applications, but the Humble Bundle guys repeatedly do a "pay what you want" thing. The people downloading Linux copies of the bundle seem to consistently pay more than the others.
It would need a CEO even worse than Ballmer - why should MS help competiting products? Why help Google's Chromebooks when Google is killing every MS YouTube app? Office is still one of the strong reasons to choose Windows and then another pletora of MS software. No sensible CEO would kill that revenues and such a competitive advantage.
If Linux needs a decent Office suite, it's up to Linux developers to deliver it. But till now nor Lotus, nor Borland/WordPerfect/Corel, nor OpenOffice/LibreOffice has been able to deliver that. Why?
@LDS - >"If Linux needs a decent Office suite, it's up to Linux developers to deliver it."
Why should Linux developers HAVE to offer perfect interoperability with a proprietary format?? In fact, what you are saying seems almost impossible.
Wow - all I'm saying is it sure would be nice to be able to deal with MS Office files correctly without having to dual boot or run Windows in a VM - and I'm getting killed here from fanboys for both MS and Linux.
And yes - I would pay for it, as I'm sure many others would.
"Why should Linux developers HAVE to offer perfect interoperability with a proprietary format?"
Because it is a *de facto standard* and exist probably billions of documents in that format?
Moreover now is fully documented, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118(v=office.12).aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg134034.aspx - thereby it's just up to Linux developers add support for those format. If someone thinks they will damage the "purity" of Linux and thereby the evil MS format should not be supported, well, don't ask MS then to support Linux at its own disadvantage.
It's like Photoshop .PSD format, AutoCAD DWG and others de facto standards. If you want to write any useful applications, you have to support then unless you have enough mass to force adoption of your own format. If you don't, then don't complain people don't use your application. Even MS had to support competitors' file formats when they became standard - it tried its alternative to PDF for example, and failed, despite its mass.
You would pay for it, but MS would be silly to pay development for a software that will decrease its revenues, not increase them.
Well, the Linux purists idea that Linux software should not support "proprietary" standards although fully documented and without royalties is what has doomed Linux as a desktop operating system.
Most users are not interested in the technology or the "purity" of the OS or software - they need to get thei daily job done.
And if that means to deal with MS Office documents, they will get the software that handles that without issues. And because MS Office is the only one able to do it because Linux talibans don't want to gets their hands dirty reading MS specs and implementing them, MS will keep on having a huge advantage and will keep on using it to sustain MS Windows sales - they would be mad renouncing to it.
So keep on dreaming an "Office for Linux", or "Office for Chome". It will never materialize.
@Rampant - >"Wine runs quite a few older versions of office (and photoshop for that matter)."
I used to maintain some of the Adobe Acrobat versions under Wine. I never found that Adobe or MS Office products worked well under Wine. Mostly, they were somewhat crippled versions, prone to unexpected crashing. Can't do a whole lot of real work that way.
Have you ever used Office for Mac? The current version has at least got a reasonable level of compatibility with Office for Windows but it is slow, crash prone and in my opinion, deliberately designed to persuade Mac users to use Windows on their Macs.
Example? I wrote a simple VBA macro to fill a table with some test data; I don't recall quite how many it did and can't find the file anywhere but it took Excel 2007 something like 2.5 seconds to complete. Excel 2011 took over 30 seconds to run the same script on the same machine.
Outlook 2013 is pretty pants though so perhaps one of the suite apps is superior on the Mac side...
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