My guess is that it's also at least partially reflective of how .NET's status at Microsoft has changed over the past two decades.

Remember 20 years ago, when .NET wasn't just a managed software development platform? It was a company-wide strategy[1] that was meant to encompass more-or-less their entire product line. The whole Microsoft future was .NET, and they were going to have a .NET edition of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, etc.

Since then, those plans have been dropped, Microsoft's (.NET-based) preferred GUI toolkits, WinForms and WPF, were replaced by one that is .NET-compatible but not .NET-native, etc. etc. .NET just isn't as central to Microsoft's identity as it was 20 years ago.

Which, I'm guessing, means that the .NET team is now a lot freer to go cross-platform without inviting the wrath of the Windows team.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

> wrath of the Windows team.

There is not much of Windows team to wield the wrath:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...

They are still around.

https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/

Read towards the end.

I think the initial ".net strategy" was just a (failed) marketing exercise. It was supposedly some kind of grand vision where the .net framework were just one component and SOAP was another. They certainly did not plan to base Windows or SQL Server on the .net framework.

They did try a number of times to write kernels in C#-like languages. Singularity, Midori, etc.

This spawned a lot of interesting academic work that influenced languages such as Rust... trying to get high level features and safety without need for a runtime.

You're correct. I'm certain that you're fully aware of Midori, but as you alluded to, a Microsoft Research initiative, but never was on the official roadmap. .Net itself has been a great success. I was completely sold on .Net Core and .Net 5 is exactly where they needed to take it.

He understand that Microsoft is a software company, and makes money selling software and software services. Steve Ballmer, for all his good attributes, was stuck seeing Microsoft as a Windows company, thinking everything had to relate back to Windows. Nadella understand that companies change or die. Ballmer just thought that meant finding new places to shove Windows.

an ironic twist is that microsoft always made very good hardware (typing this on a natural keyboard 4000 & also the xbox controller).

I'm pretty skeptical of all the Microsoft praise lately, but if this is indeed true, it's a big deal. And probably a management feat somewhere (CEO or otherwise).

I worked on dev tools at Google and recall many efforts over the years to try to unify the customer experience -- between internal and external tools, Go and Dart, Android and Chrome devtools, etc. Things always lurched in one direction or another, but never consistently. It was always above someone's pay grade to choose one or the other, so you ended up with both.

Convincing engineers on devtools to abandon their babies is indeed hard!

On the other hand, I think if you dig deep, Microsoft still has all the legacy, but they cover it up with a lot of branding. Hence the top comment in this thread about confusing branding.

Older execs probably had to be defensive and reactionary because they had to protect their main source of income, Windows.

But it's clear now that 1) Windows has zero chance of taking a significant market share away from Linux in the cloud and 2) cloud technology is an important area of growth for MS.

Satya probably sees that stubbornly sticking to Windows just isn't going to work anymore, so it's better to play nice with the others.

I don’t know. I think they’re still the same at the core, they just do enough to try and stay relevant.

Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen.

My companies online outlook shows that MS is adding clones of all the tools (slack/trello).

They’ve been successful and monitizing in this new era

> Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen.

I have a hard time believing it would be easy. I use both Office for Windows and Mac, and the differences are great enough that I'm guessing that there's a huge amount of divergent code in the UIs. And both would be written against GUI toolkits that are not present on Linux, so a Linux port would be yet another major effort.

That said, I think that you're right that it's not going to happen. My understanding is that a major consideration for anyone looking to port a commercial desktop product to Linux is that Linux desktop users are, in the broad, very hesitant to spend $100s on a commercial product when open source alternatives exist. My guess would be that a Linux port of Office just isn't a proposition that is likely to generate positive profits.

Office Online is the desktop Linux user's access to Office. Enough people use Macs that it makes sense to invest into the effort, else some other vendor will gobble up Office's marketshare. I use Office Online and LibreOffice all the time on Windows 10, some documents it's just better to have guaranteed formatting compatibility with the majority of documents which are put out through MS Office. I would personally just continue the same pattern if I were a desktop Linux user.

> Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. They're rewriting Office in React Native so Windows, OSX, and mobile ports will have a lot more in common.

But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"

And the only way to build market share is through cannibalization of windows licenses. Not in microsoft's interest. If you hae a proper office for windows, I bet many companies would consider seriously switching to Linux.

Office has been available for Mac for well over two decades. There are so many more reasons for companies preferring Windows on the desktop than just Office.

I think there were so may more reasons. But what I see is all internal apps moving to be web based. 5 more years and Office is really going to be the last thing tying up corporates to Windows.

Linux as it exists today on the desktop is still a headache. If anything, if office were ported to Chrome OS, that would be a real alternative.

Office already runs on Chromebooks via Google Play within the Android container [0]. Is it then worth MS' time and energy to port the browser interface as a Chrome OS 'native' app?

[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...

o365's web interface is pretty much what you're asking for. It's a rent based model, but so are the desktop apps at this point (mostly). It wouldn't really surprise me to see an electron wrapper around o365 UI for a future release to unify the applications more.

The only part of "Office" I really even use though is Outlook (at work), and it's pretty good at the job it does.

Call me when Linux has anything that works as well as AD.

It does; it's called AD. :)

The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).

You just need a server running AD. Third party and browser SSO with AD is a solved problem.

FreeIPA?!

Why would companies just switch to Linux?

Enterprises don't just use free OSS software like that. They'll use Redhat or some other corporate-backed variant, and in the end the license cost will be the same but most software and drivers don't work, users will need to be retrained, and support costs will rise dramatically. They can't even use .NET to build any internal desktop apps either.

It's a terrible deal.

I'd switch to Linux on day one if they'd port Office.However, windows licensing costs are negligible in most companies,compared to the overall spending on software.

>They're rewriting Office in React Native?

I tried some googling but the results seems to be all speculation. Is this really happening?

This seems to be the main source: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128

I thought they published an article that explicitly mentions RN but I can't find it at the moment. MS has also been heavily working on RN for Windows including a C++ bridge that significantly increases the performance of the JS to native bridge.

That's really insane, although it makes more sense than, say, writing a code editor in Javascript.

Does it? VSCode is refreshingly quick while Word is (already) brutally slow.

Just switch Word to draft (nee Normal) render mode. It was never meant to be performant in print layout mode.

But that’s how everybody uses it. That’s the default mode when you start a new document. Who even knows that the other mode exists?

Surely they could make it performant in the default mode that everybody uses now that it’s 2019 and we have megahertz to spare? There is no excuse for Word’s atrocious performance.

Draft/normal was the default in Word 2003. Most people have used it.

The problem with page layout mode is that any non-trivial format change, insertion, or deletion requires repagination and the UI freezes until that is completed. Draft mode repaginates asynchronously so that it remains responsive. Comparing a WYSIWYG editor to a plain text editor is no contest as the former performs much more work to layout the text.

I use Word a lot on documents of varying complexity and size range from one to about 500 pages and, other than doing something like a TOC update on a giant and complex document, I've never seen Word be painfully slow, even in Print layout.

Painfully (and randomly shifting) inaccurate in print layout on documents that involve more than just text, sure, I see that every day.

The efforts have been spent on cloud services. Office 365 online is rather good, OneDrive finally works, and other things like Teams and DevOps are being well integrated.

For 95% of business users, these online editions have all the capabilities they need without the install headache and are much easier to maintain and update. Office Desktop just had a refresh too but there's basically 0% Linux business users to spend the millions in development costs for a variant.

Yeah clearly they are throwing a lot of spaghetti at things, I don't know that that's necessarily bad. At least they are trying to do so openly and in a API-centric way instead of just building the garden walls higher like every other company.

I haven't used Office in years and don't know anyone who has, so I'm not sure how big of a priority it is to add platforms to a product like that.

Have you looked at Office365?

It only took about 5 years to get one rendering engine for both Mac and windows, but sure it would be easy.

Office on Linux already exist, it's called Office 365. Porting Office desktop for an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users makes no sense.

> an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users

Arguably a large part of the reason that Linux isn't used in offices is because MS Office isn't available. Of course it's in Microsoft's interest to keep it that way.

C'mon, that's complete bullshit. Linux is very hostile to the everyday user, you can't expect a large majority of users to have to fiddle as much as it's necessary to get a barely passable desktop experience on Linux. You buy a Windows or Mac computer and you're going in 10 minutes. There's no combination of distro or hardware where that's true for Linux.

I pretty much disagree here. Before she passed last year, I had my grandmother on linux for about 11 years. I had wine setup for the handful of old games (95 era) she liked, and made sure to update everything once or twice a year. Of course one time I waited too long. Archived her home dir, and installed the latest Ubuntu, restored her home dir, and she was up and running again.

She didn't have to know anything about linux to use it. The same is true for a lot of people. More so in a corporate environment with dedicated staff to handle the harder problems. Hell, most people in offices could get away with a Chromebook and Office 365 today.

Of course, general use laptops and proper linux support are not things that are very common. That part truly sucks. And, yeah, it's not pre-installed for the most part except for some boutique vendors and a couple Dell offerings.

Aside:

Have had a few looks at System 76 lately. May change out my mid-2014 rmbp next year. Unfortunately it's one of the last systems with NVidia, and the metal 2 support for the 750M doesn't work well at all. I'm also probably going to change my desktop to Linux in a few months. Hackintosh support is all but going away, and although I could change out my GTX 1080 with a next gen Navi for hackintosh, but I just don't want to support the mac platform anymore, and my 1080 has a lot of life left in it.

yeah sounds pretty straightforward /s

Again... with an office environment, with dedicated staff... the USERS don't really need to know all this stuff, just where to click to open their browser, etc.

Not sure that I agree with this. I know plenty of non-technical users who have been perfectly happy with a default Ubuntu (or similar) install.

It only really breaks if you want to customise it (or your hardware is badly supported).

I love Linux Mint and Antergos as much as the next guy but Microsoft built an entire platform/ecosystem around tight integration between a full range of enterprise products. I can't say I blame them, decades of significant effort is required to do that and it's not easy or there would be someone else who has done it. Not only is the incentive not there as you mentioned, but it's definitely not malevolence to avoid trying to support random desktop Linux distros which will likely not cooperate with their integration efforts (and likely take joy in being able to reject or impede MS's efforts), to the degree they can with Windows 10.

They have the right idea today, embrace server-side Linux with .Net Core, and soon, .Net 5. That's what Linux is primarily intended for, it's a server kernel and where the action is in regards to that ecosystem. There's a reason some of the code in X11 hasn't been touched in 20 years.

And missing 99% of the features.

That's not true. If anything, it's closer to having 99% of the features.

Not taking anything away from Satya, but all of the big tech CEOs seem to be able to successfully pivot:

- Netflix - moved from delivering discs to streaming and moved their entire infrastructure to AWS and CDNs

- Amazon - went from just being a first party retailer to being a marketplace, AWS, and Alexa.

- Apple - as of last quarter all five of their major verticals are large enough to be a F200 company by itself.

- Facebook -- Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions but it didn't ruin either and they are both larger than they would have been.

- Google -- well still just a one trick pony - search ads (as far as profits) no matter how many things they against a wall.

What? Satya didn't invent .Net. The idea of .Net, like the JRE, was to write once and run everywhere. What's visionary about it?

It's sad how so many articles and comments come off just pure PR now. Not saying your comment is, but I have to wonder how much of the "news", comments and internet content is now just PR.

For a very long time .Net was Windows only. That only changed after Balmer was gone and Satya came in.

Some cross-platform considerations have been built into it from the start, though. And there has been an official open-source implementation on a non-Windows platform. Perhaps more to show that it's possible than as an actual usable artifact, but it was there.

I think describing Mono as Official is a bit of a reach. AFAIK they benefited from the patent promise but that was about it until the acquisition.

If you mean .NET Core as official open source, that's true, but it's a relatively recent thing.

There was Rotor on FreeBSD. Probably more a proof of concept, but it was there.

Mono existed from very early on with .Net and the core was pretty compatible. I think when MS bought Xamarin, it finally got the attention it deserved, and really did go to help .Net Core take form.