You’re citing things that happened almost 20 years ago if you’re talking about Solaris and BeOS.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dredmorbius on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:49PM
(#21601058)
Precisely my point. The tiger rarely changes its stripes.
Microsoft isn't a tiger, it's a group of people. There is some continuity, but the people making those decisions are not the same people making those decisions now.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dredmorbius on Friday November 22, 2019 @01:38AM
(#21603349)
Must be why Apple went out of business selling weird computers that ran an unstable proprietary OS using PowerPC CPU’s. And Google never went back to China because of their founders’ personal/family experiences living under communism.
>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.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dredmorbius on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:49PM
(#21601051)
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.
I think MSIE and the Windows Media player appeared for Solaris for a really short while at least. Outlook Express too, it seems.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by yellowapple on Thursday November 21, 2019 @07:26PM
(#21601273)
> This may have been MSIE
Indeed it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dredmorbius on Friday November 22, 2019 @01:35AM
(#21603337)
Thanks. That was part of it.
I think I may also have been recalling Wabi, a Windows Application Binary Interface for Solaris, effectively rather like Wine, I believe.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dredmorbius on Friday November 22, 2019 @01:27PM
(#21608398)
Not directly addressing my points above, but a 1996 Linux Journal piece by Michael K. Johnson describing the compatibility landscape at the time:
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.