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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
I think I may also have been recalling Wabi, a Windows Application Binary Interface for Solaris, effectively rather like Wine, I believe.
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.
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.
The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding inner workings.
But even for big corps (which are mostly running the show when it comes to Kernel dev these days) it's much easier to whack the Linux kernel into shape for whatever you want to achieve, than trying to work with Microsoft to get what you want from NT.
I agree a significant part (necessary part?) of Linux success among hackers and developers is it being FOSS... I don't know much about NT kernel but it would be quite interesting to see the alternate reality in which it was also FOSS and independent of the rest of windows, I wonder if it would have a similar success in the arenas Linux does.
There are some other really interesting FOSS kernels out there today like Minix3 (quite different from the Minix that inspired Linux), they are sure to have deficiencies when directly compared to something like Linux due to the difference in the shear size of community driving them, but they have noteworthy designs, superior in various aspects, and they make me wonder, is there only enough space in the world for so many popular FOSS kernels? i.e how much of Linux is now inertia much like windows desktop? (and I say this as a full time Linux user)
You would need extensive partnership agreements like what Google has with Microsoft regards Chrome or Samsung has with Microsoft regards .NET Core. Challenging for smaller vendors.
Linux has a more pure (not owned) FOSS style making it successful.
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.
The rest of their business is where the money is. Office runs one way or the other out of the web, on Android, iOS or macOS.
I'm no sure the powers that be at Microsoft have any great love for Win32.
Back when Windows 8 was released they introduced UPM (Universal Windows Platform) and that looked a lot like an attempt to actually kill off Win32.
They only backed away from this strategy after the backlash they got from Win32 Windows developers.
Move on to today and I think they are now using platforms like .NET Core 3.0 to gently move developers away from Win32.
They did, that's how SQL Server runs on Linux
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.
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.
I haven't used Google Docs in a long time and had forgotten about them.
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.
This was the very reason that prevented Google to release Google Chrome for Linux.
At least on Debian, it plays perfectly well with the Distro's package management. They use it to auto update google-chrome in preference to their roll their own on effort Windows. The same update system works perfect well on all Debian derived distro's. I'm not familiar with an rpm based distro to say for sure, but I imagine the situation is the same. So "fragmented" means supporting 2 very well tested distribution systems rather than rolling their own - and having the "take out all Macbooks" problems they did on OSX.
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
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/).
If your software is proprietary (or not popular enough to be found in most repos), there's always container technologies like Snap/AppImage/FlatPak/etc.
As a Windows dev I find both of these to be vastly superior to the standard Windows practice of shipping every DLL that's not in system32 alongside your executable, on top of whatever VC++ redistributables and/or .NET framework might not be present on the system.
> There is no well-defined "Linux platform"
There actually is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
Edit: Query re downvote, too subjective?
And that is because office and other major applications aren't available on linux.
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.
The market for Beethoven is also too small to be worth considering. What does the market know?
Samba 4.11 is scalable to 100,000+ users.
In case you want to give us a try :-).
What troubles me THE most on linux is interoperability of applications, there is literally nothing replacing microsoft "office" (not a product Office) stack, it is not a problem for my expertise, but for ordinary John Doe (or lets call him "the manager"), Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product. This is the target that linux must pursue. But it is not there. Still struggling to reinvent hot water (systemd, dbus,...), as it is more fun. But not more usable. Anyway, i am satisfied with my shell...
I think I read this claim from you here before. What's up with that?
These days, kernel32 (split off into kernelbase and others in the Vista and Win7 days) mostly has small wrappers to ntdll.
A COM interface is really just a C++ VTable. So the "overhead" of that is basically minimum 3 function pointers and some indirect calls. What is the problem with having a COM object passed to a kernel32 function? Would you have the same objection if it were a (barely any different) function pointer plus an extra pointer for context?
The complaint about manifests maybe made me think this was about WinSXS or something. Which I would agree is engineered kind of poorly, but I doubt it's the worst thing in Windows.
[Disclaimer. I worked as an IC SDE at MS from 2008-2011.]
> Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year.
I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is that people actually prefer using Microsoft Office products:
> Our survey found that 67% of knowledge workers prefer Microsoft Word over Google Docs, while only 15% report the opposite. When it comes to email, 49% prefer Microsoft Outlook over Gmail, while 35% report the opposite.
[1]: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2019/
[2]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/31/office-suite-market-...
To wit, you can't even define custom styles!
Except when your target market is captured by network effects and demands a particular file format regardless of how appropriate it is for the material.
Idk what it’s like on Windows but all Linux has is the web UI anyway so it’s probably the same.
It feels almost intentionally bad, I’m not sure what’s going on there but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pay me to use it. IMO at least with SMB you don’t have to use that godawful file manager.
I wish Google provided better integration of GDrive w/Linux...
I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.
There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.
This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? We'd be grateful.
Google docs is absolutely inferior in its power, formatting options, display performance, ability to write mathematical equations and diagrams directly into the document, etc.
Every time I had to produce a non-trivial report in google docs I grind my teeth and end up rendering these things elsewhere and insert them as png.
Additionally, google docs gives you no ownership over the software or the files I find it's commercial model unsettling.
After a multi-year hiatus of using Windows (because my customers were running mostly on Linux, Mac OS or did BYOD), on my current industrial/research project I'm back to using Office (Skype for Biz, Outlook for team comm and partially Sharepoint, Excel and even PowerPoint (!) for spec docs) on Windows VMs and I have to say I can't fathom how these people can get anything done at all. Lync/Skype4b is bordering on ususable for me (normal Skype works just fine), and it not being available for Linux is a show-stopper. The only tolerable tool that doesn't get in the way all the time is Excel, and even that has laughably primitive versioning in SP compared to tools of the git era. With this office software lineup I think web-based tools will totally dominate the next decade.
Classic office suites on Linux is a sufficiently well solved problem with Open Office/Libre Office IMO, and I don't expect it to get any better, ever. The reason is simply that classic office software where people print out, sign, scan, paper-mail, and fax letters has run its course.
In establishing standards, diversity is a weakness, unfortunately.
Edit: I actually bothered to check and the EOL is 2021. New customers are directed to Teams. I used Teams at work, and it’s crap quality UX, but it does the job. For chat at least. (PowerPoint crashed on me multiple times this week from within Teams.)
Here's an example in the other direction: install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on. This is trivial in most Windows software, but requires recompilation from source for most Linux software.
Installing any program, compiling a c file, opening non-zip archives, writing an iso to a usb, counting the lines that contain a certain word in a file, removing the preinstalled spyware, etc.
> install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on
Windows is certainly much better than this than most distros (although it is not perfect, many programs such as the sims 2 expansion packs for example had issues with being installed in another disk). That being said, I am pretty sure that Nix does not have this issue.
The dysfunction on the main GUI level is even more obvious: using command line is still not necessary for a Windows user. Linux would be utterly unusable without the command line and the command line programs. I believe that even those who write GUI and GUI apps themselves aren't using them.
Sharepoint is an abomination, always was and always will be. It's not something that you'd use voluntarely.
That it forms part of their business model is not enough, if Microsoft would prefer dominance of its proprietary technologies.
Conceivably, the future of Microsoft's business model may be where development and maintenance of Windows / the NT kernel is deemed burdensome and not critical to their business, and Windows becomes a premium Linux distribution with legacy subsystems.
Using Linux at work, I'm indirectly a Microsoft customer, using Office 365 and Azure (an expanding portion of their business), yet the investment in Windows desktop is lost on me, and unnecessary to retain my business.
On the client-side, MS is not worried much about Linux desktop and hence will not invest in office for Linux.
On the server-side, Linux is a platform of choice for new projects (I would say Kubernetes and containers but those are based on Linux) and hence windows server moved to a more legacy state.
In this case, if Microsoft wants to be relevant for future projects, it must embrace Linux.
However, since there is no money in Linux as an OS, Microsoft is in the process of becoming a hardware company due to azure. And as such, it would like to commoditize its supplement which is the OS.
Microsoft has a history that makes skepticism warranted. Look up "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"
Off the top of my head:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Plus, I don't see how this contradicts the OP. Maybe EEE was the best way to make money then, but supporting Linux developers is the best way to make money now
Office already runs on MacOS and iOS
As for AD, Azure's hosted services for this may well see more inroads into Linux, and I know a LOT of people/companies that would be beyond happy to use MS account management with a cleaner Linux integration.
I won't be using these things at home any time soon, but in a corporate space, MS would be a welcome and cost saving change compared to what is out there on Linux currently.
Not sure about your memory claim either - I don't recall high memory usage in Office ever being an issue.
Microsoft released Windows Virtual Desktop earlier this year that is basically a cloud version of Windows 10 (or 7) or Office, that’s designed to be used like Stadia.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on any of these projects
https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/81670?...
https://www.windowscentral.com/its-official-microsoft-teams-...
EDIT: Yup, the link referenced by the article (https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...) says:
"We’re pleased to confirm the Teams client for Linux will be available in preview by the end of this calendar year, enabling people who use Linux client at work or in educational institutions to collaborate with others on Teams. Users will be able to install native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats."
It should really be "<X corporation> loves <Y> because it makes them money" because let's be honest, the only reason these companies make any decisions, moral or not, is to make money They supported <any movement> and showcased these supports with events, banners, and advertisement only because that's what they _need_ to do to make _profit_.
They could easily discard all of these values the moment a government or a market said they can't do it. Just look at all the companies bowing down to China.
This one I don't really understand why not. Presumably Office for Linux would still bring in revenue. Just not the additional indirect revenue of a Windows license.
> (though a web interface is possible),
I am not totally familiar with the "Office365" brand and what it includes, but I get the impression some browser based stuff already works on Linux. In work accounts at former employers I have used a web-based Outlook on Linux and FreeBSD that had some "Office365" branding.
> and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs
This one I don't know why they would ever do. Win32 apps are still driving revenue and customer satisfaction for them. More, I think, than they admit to themselves. Witness they tried to kill Win32 apps in the Windows 8 cycle, and failed. Then kept trying to resurrect the idea of killing Win32, and had to walk it back every time. Surface RT wouldn't do third party Win32 apps. Neither would Windows Store initially. Then they floated a Windows 10 amd64 SKU that couldn't run third party Win32 apps. Nobody wanted this stuff. That legacy is pretty much the only thing that keeps people on Windows.
This is the real elephant in the room. Despite all their other flaws Microsoft has an excellent record of maintaining their software well after release. Particularly when it comes to their core products like Office or Windows. WIN32 programs or XLS files from 30 years ago still work on the latest versions.
If Microsoft didn't have this commitment, then porting Office to Linux as an experiment might be worth it. Even if there's a 10% chance it takes root, that's good revenue. But even if only a small base of users bought Office Linux it, Microsoft's reputation would require them keep maintaining it for decades.
A while ago I needed to experiment with an old file format, and I found a Linux binary of a proprietary tool from the 90s. It linked to libc version 5 (from before the Linux world adopted glibc). It would have been complicated to get it running.
I found a Windows binary of the same tool. Put it on a Win10 VM I had for other purposes. No issues.
Stable binary ABI of userland is something the Linux world doesn't do well. Win32 and COM are really good at this.
* There are, right now, online browser-based versions of most of their office applications available, which work fine on Linux.
* if [1] is anything to go by, we might see client-side Javascript/Electron based clients, which would make the porting to other platforms a lot cheaper/easier to maintain. Even if a "native" (read: electron-wrapped) Linux client wouldn't be in the works, the browser-based versions will probably be just the exact same version.
[1] https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128
Maybe the OS market was profitable for decades, but isn't anymore?
Maybe their goal is to move everything to Linux in the next decade so they don't have to develop their own stuff, getting all that free OSS dev power and can control them by supplying cloud based user-land software, because "Linux never breaks user space"... who knows.
Kerberos can’t survive in untrusted networks, and products like Azure AD and Okta are far more profitable, especially since the license that pays for AD (ie windows, even for Linux clients), is required anyway!
Wasn't Kerberos designed to work in untrusted networks?
Azure AD DS (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-...) is a specific offering from Azure which gives you a hosted AD instance, but otherwise AAD is completely different.
Additionally, with cloud email/office becoming the standard, there’s powerful levers to incentive cloud adoption and shifting of compliance standards.
I don't think this trend is as large as SV web devs think it is, nor do I think the trend will continue indefinitely in that direction. My current corporate masters hate the cloud because they want to be in control of their own data and services. They don't want to twiddle their thumbs when somethings wrong while waiting for BigCorp to get around to fixing it. They really, really don't like paying rent on business essential tooling.
And they've pretty much been proven right in all their concerns so far.
You typically need a more robust, web-compliant solution using e.g. tokens + MFA and web-compliant centralization of authority and certs on e.g. Consul or Red Hat Identity Management.
That being said, IMHO, it's a much saner and safer approach to bite that bullet and setup a rock-solid ID/Auth system on-prems (or at least vendor-agnostic and load-balanced over at least 2 major providers). It's really the kind of low-level infra that you can setup properly once and use for a decade, + cost of extra features you may want to add later.
Don't know what you're talking about, they work just fine. All of our branch offices and salesmen are remote workers.
Most places want to control capex and limit capacity wastage. Nobody wants to invest in datacenter facilities. Even the government, which has access to super cheap capital, is embracing cloud.
The shift is real. In my area, a major infrastructure OEM like HPE has like 2 CEs that cover the region. There was probably 14-16 20 years ago.
The answer is usually that legacy apps, SMB, Voip, and printing require trust derived from the network.
They did it for SQL Server, and they built a full API compatibility shim to do it:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/17/how-microsoft-brought-sql-...
They don't need to. Samba exists; nothing stopping Microsoft from sending in patches.
I rather thought the point of the article was that Microsoft didn't actually love linux but pretended that it did to stave off irrelevance in markets where linux is kicking their ass (i.e. server).
As he said, if they really loved linux and this isn't just another "embrace, extend, extinguish" ploy sugarcoated in PR niceties they'd be porting office and directx and outlook to linux.
Which they're not.
The dev tools and .NET team actually like Linux, the Windows team hate those guys, the Office team hate everyone, the Skype team hate their lives, the Nokia team, well...
Expecting a single determined vision from Microsoft isn't rational. It's multiple business units who don't really coordinate and just happen to share a logo.
Again I've only formed this view from hints and allusions but it seems to explain a lot.
Turn Word into a webapp? This has been happening for years, but no web editor can offer even 50% of the functionality offered by Word. Office365 is competitive with GSuite.
Drop Win32? That's basically asking Microsoft to commit suicide and destroy all companies who rely on windows to run their software. They were trying to get people to move to UWP, and look how hard that has been.
Port DirectX? Maybe, don't know. Given that Unity and Unreal both support OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, and they are available on Windows, would this make any difference?
Microsoft doesn't love Linux if it interferes with its monopolies. It never did and it never will. That's the whole point.
It didn't turn over any new leaf like it claimed. It just adapted its existing strategy as a means to stave off impending irrelevance in the server market.
Not turning over a new leaf WAS the "sensible" thing to do.
Microsoft continues to make billions of dollars a year in royalties by accusing device makers of patent infringement.
AD and ADAM are shockingly low performance compared to Sun/Netscape LDAP. They depend on extensive client side caching to work at all.
If you want to tie Unix clients to AD, the first step is to mirror your AD content in a more competent LDAP cluster
[1] https://imgur.com/a/rp0VFR4 [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-android-apps-chrome...
No, no, no. That's not the reason. Have you actually read the article?
The reason is that Microsoft is doing a sophisticated stratagem against Linux. It wants to infiltrate the Linux ecosystem, and then when they can keep taps on every piece of essential software, they will pull the plug.
The same with patent pledge, they want to bait as much companies to use Linux thinking that Microsoft will not patent troll them, and then they will reveal their true intentions, and sue them all.
That trick even got a name now. People in the industry called Microsoft's infiltration strategy "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
Linux crowd will soon realise what trick they are trying to do, and I hope they will do that before it is too late.
They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively).
Active Directory is so deeply integrated into the Windows stack that it will never come out. You can authenticate Linux clients against AD, but I doubt they'll be writing a Linux AD server any time soon. I'd imagine most corporate mail servers also support SMTP/IMAP, and Office365 has a web client. As far as ActiveSync goes, that hasn't been a thing since 2007.