Microsoft Office Coming To Linux In 2014

[Motoko.]

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/06/microsoft-considering-a-linux-version-of-office-in-2014/

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/147813-microsoft-looking-to-release-office-for-linux-in-2014

http://www.redmondpie.com/microsoft-office-coming-to-linux-in-2014-according-to-report/

[redvamp128]

Truth be told this will probably be free viewers... then you have to pay to get the ability to write in them.

That way people can still save things in their docx format instead of shifting to the open format.

[Knife Party]

mmm, sounds real tempting... Would not mind///

[torrentthief]

this is 6 weeks old news :( They probably will release ms office for linux as governments are switching to linux and they don't want to miss out on those government contracts.

[evieluvsrainbows]

this is 6 weeks old news :( They probably will release ms office for linux as governments are switching to linux and they don't want to miss out on those government contracts.

Sure, like governments will switch to Linux. Windows is too good of an operating system for them to switch to Linux.

[Ph1b3r0pt1c]

Sure, like governments will switch to Linux. Windows is too good of an operating system for them to switch to Linux.

Well lets see:

• In July 2001^[1] the White House started moving their computers to a Linux platform based on Red Hat Linux and Apache HTTP Server.^[2] The installation was completed in February 2009.^[3][4] In October 2009 the White House servers adopted Drupal, an open source content management system software distribution.^[5][6]
  
• Brazil uses PC Conectado, a program utilizing Linux.
  
• City of Munich chose 2003 to start to migrate its 14,000 desktops to Debian-based LiMux.^[7] Even though more than 80% of workstations used OpenOffice and 100% used Firefox/Thunderbird five years later (November 2008),^[8] an adoption rate of Linux itself of only 20.0% (June 2010) was achieved.^[9][10] The effort was later reorganized, focusing on smaller deployments and winning over staff to the value of the program. By the end of 2011 the program had exceeded its goal and changed over 9000 desktops to Linux.^[11] The city of Munich reported at the end of 2012 that the migration to Linux was highly successful and has already saved the city over ?11 million (US$14 million).^[12]
  
• The United States Department of Defense uses Linux - "the U.S. Army is ?the? single largest install base for Red Hat Linux"^[13] and the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux.^[14]
  
• The city of Vienna has chosen to start migrating its desktop PCs to Debian-based Wienux.^[15] However, the idea was largely abandoned, because the necessary software was incompatible with Linux.^[16]
  
• Spain was noted as the furthest along the road to Linux adoption in 2003.,^[17] for example with Linux distribution LinEx
  
• State owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is installing Linux in all of its 20,000 retail branches as the basis for its web server and a new terminal platform. (2005) ^[18]
  
• In April 2006, the US Federal Aviation Administration announced that it had completed a migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one third of the scheduled time and saved 15 million dollars.^{[19][dead link]}
  
• The Government of Pakistan established a Technology Resource Mobilization Unit in 2002 to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors and to educate users about free software alternatives. Linux is an option for poor countries which have little revenue for public investment; Pakistan is using open source software in public schools and colleges, and hopes to run all government services on Linux eventually.
  
• The French Parliament has switched to using Ubuntu on desktop PCs.^[20][21]
  
• The Federal Employment Office of Germany (Bundesagentur f?r Arbeit) has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse.^[22]
  
• Czech Post migrated 4000 servers and 12,000 clients to Novell Linux in 2005^[23][24]
  
• Cuba - Students from the Cuban University of Information Science launched its own distribution of Linux called Nova to promote the replace of Microsoft Windows on civilian and government computers, a project that is now supported by the Cuban Government. By early 2011 the Universidad de Ciencias Inform?ticas announced that they would migrate more than 8000 PCs to this new operating system.^[25][26][27]
  
• The Canton of Solothurn in Switzerland decided in 2001 to migrate its computers to Linux, but in 2010 the Swiss authority has made a U-turn by deciding to use Windows 7 for desktop clients.^[28]
  
• France's national police force, the National Gendarmerie started moving their 90,000 desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2007 over concerns about the additional training costs of moving to Windows Vista, and following the success of OpenOffice.org roll-outs. The migration should be completed by 2015. The force has saved about ?50 million on software licensing between 2004 and 2008.^[29][30][31]
  
• France's Ministry of Agriculture uses Mandriva Linux.^[31]
  
• Macedonia's Ministry of Education and Science deployed more than 180,000 Ubuntu based classroom desktops, and has encouraged every student in the Republic of Macedonia to use Ubuntu computer workstations.^[32]
  
• The People's Republic of China exclusively uses Linux as the operating system for its Loongson processor family, with the aim of technology independence.^[33]
  
• The US National Nuclear Security Administration operates the world's tenth fastest supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner, which uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating systems.^[34]
  
• The regional Andalusian Autonomous Government of Andaluc?a in Spain developed its own Linux distribution, called Guadalinex in 2004.^[35]
  
• The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) deployed Multi-station Linux Desktops to address budget and infrastructure constraints in 50 rural sites.^[36]
  
• In 2003, the Turkish government decided to create its own Linux distribution, Pardus, developed by UEKAE (National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology). The first version, Pardus 1.0, was officially announced in 27 December 2005.^[37]
  
• In 2010 The Philippines fielded an Ubuntu-powered national voting system.^[38]
  
• In July 2010 Malaysia had switched 703 of the state's 724 agencies to Free and Open Source software with a Linux based operating system used.^[39] The Chief Secretary to the Government cited, "(the) general acceptance of its promise of better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost".^[40]
  
• In late 2010 Vladimir Putin signed a plan to move the Russian Federation government towards free software including Linux in the second quarter of 2012.^[41][42]
  
• The city government of Largo, Florida, USA uses Linux and has won international recognition for their implementation, indicating that it provides "extensive savings over more traditional alternatives in city-wide applications."^[43]
  
• Iceland has announced in March 2012 that it wishes to migrate to open source software in public institutions. Schools have already migrated from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.^[44]
  
• In June 2012 the US Navy signed a US$27,883,883 contract with Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) Northrup-Grumman MQ8B Fire Scout drones. The contract involves Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 in preparation for the Linux systems.^[45]
  

Thats alot of money if Microsoft does that, AND they can convince them to go with Office.

[AJerman]

I can't think of any reason why this would be a good idea. You can already take a large chunk of Linux users and guarantee they'll never use it. A lot of Linux users won't use closed source software like this (I know it said "considering open sourcing", I'll believe it when I see it, more likely PARTS will be open source with a number of proprietary plugins), a lot of Linux users are Microsoft haters or using Linux to specifically get away from Microsoft and their licensing, AND LibreOffice works pretty damn well these days. I'm a Linux user, and I'm not uptight about closed source software or a MS hater or anything, but I can't see why I would ever care if Office was available on Linux. I'll stick to LibreOffice.

But hey, I guess I've got no problem with having choices. I just think Microsoft, being Microsoft, will spend massive amounts of money on development and I think they'd find themselves shunned by probably the majority of Linux users. Doesn't seem like a wise business decision right now.

[ahhell]

http://techcrunch.co...office-in-2014/

http://www.extremete...r-linux-in-2014

http://www.redmondpi...ding-to-report/

Great sources there. :|

The redmondpie article references the Techcrunch one which in turn references the extremetech.

None of which state that MS is going to release it. :rolleyes:

[PsYcHoKiLLa]

Pffft LibreOffice, just as good and free and it's been on Linux for years.

[n_K]

"The United States Department of Defense uses Linux - "the U.S. Army is ?the? single largest install base for Red Hat Linux"^[13] and the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux.^[14]"

AFAIK that is erroneous, from an old article from many years ago I remember it saying the DoD had their own version of linux with over 100 times more lines of code than normal distributions and it was all private to the DoD.

[f0rk_b0mb]

This is old, but good news. I hope it's true. Give me foobar2000 and more steam games, and I'd be quite happy on Linux.

[HawkMan]

this is 6 weeks old news :( They probably will release ms office for linux as governments are switching to linux and they don't want to miss out on those government contracts.

I du no, I'm seeing more governments moving back to windows from windows after trying Linux the last couple of years.

[adrynalyne]

Well lets see:

• In July 2001^[1] the White House started moving their computers to a Linux platform based on Red Hat Linux and Apache HTTP Server.^[2] The installation was completed in February 2009.^[3][4] In October 2009 the White House servers adopted Drupal, an open source content management system software distribution.^[5][6]
  
• Brazil uses PC Conectado, a program utilizing Linux.
  
• City of Munich chose 2003 to start to migrate its 14,000 desktops to Debian-based LiMux.^[7] Even though more than 80% of workstations used OpenOffice and 100% used Firefox/Thunderbird five years later (November 2008),^[8] an adoption rate of Linux itself of only 20.0% (June 2010) was achieved.^[9][10] The effort was later reorganized, focusing on smaller deployments and winning over staff to the value of the program. By the end of 2011 the program had exceeded its goal and changed over 9000 desktops to Linux.^[11] The city of Munich reported at the end of 2012 that the migration to Linux was highly successful and has already saved the city over ?11 million (US$14 million).^[12]
  
• The United States Department of Defense uses Linux - "the U.S. Army is ?the? single largest install base for Red Hat Linux"^[13] and the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux.^[14]
  
• The city of Vienna has chosen to start migrating its desktop PCs to Debian-based Wienux.^[15] However, the idea was largely abandoned, because the necessary software was incompatible with Linux.^[16]
  
• Spain was noted as the furthest along the road to Linux adoption in 2003.,^[17] for example with Linux distribution LinEx
  
• State owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is installing Linux in all of its 20,000 retail branches as the basis for its web server and a new terminal platform. (2005) ^[18]
  
• In April 2006, the US Federal Aviation Administration announced that it had completed a migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one third of the scheduled time and saved 15 million dollars.^{[19][dead link]}
  
• The Government of Pakistan established a Technology Resource Mobilization Unit in 2002 to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors and to educate users about free software alternatives. Linux is an option for poor countries which have little revenue for public investment; Pakistan is using open source software in public schools and colleges, and hopes to run all government services on Linux eventually.
  
• The French Parliament has switched to using Ubuntu on desktop PCs.^[20][21]
  
• The Federal Employment Office of Germany (Bundesagentur f?r Arbeit) has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse.^[22]
  
• Czech Post migrated 4000 servers and 12,000 clients to Novell Linux in 2005^[23][24]
  
• Cuba - Students from the Cuban University of Information Science launched its own distribution of Linux called Nova to promote the replace of Microsoft Windows on civilian and government computers, a project that is now supported by the Cuban Government. By early 2011 the Universidad de Ciencias Inform?ticas announced that they would migrate more than 8000 PCs to this new operating system.^[25][26][27]
  
• The Canton of Solothurn in Switzerland decided in 2001 to migrate its computers to Linux, but in 2010 the Swiss authority has made a U-turn by deciding to use Windows 7 for desktop clients.^[28]
  
• France's national police force, the National Gendarmerie started moving their 90,000 desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2007 over concerns about the additional training costs of moving to Windows Vista, and following the success of OpenOffice.org roll-outs. The migration should be completed by 2015. The force has saved about ?50 million on software licensing between 2004 and 2008.^[29][30][31]
  
• France's Ministry of Agriculture uses Mandriva Linux.^[31]
  
• Macedonia's Ministry of Education and Science deployed more than 180,000 Ubuntu based classroom desktops, and has encouraged every student in the Republic of Macedonia to use Ubuntu computer workstations.^[32]
  
• The People's Republic of China exclusively uses Linux as the operating system for its Loongson processor family, with the aim of technology independence.^[33]
  
• The US National Nuclear Security Administration operates the world's tenth fastest supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner, which uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Fedora as its operating systems.^[34]
  
• The regional Andalusian Autonomous Government of Andaluc?a in Spain developed its own Linux distribution, called Guadalinex in 2004.^[35]
  
• The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) deployed Multi-station Linux Desktops to address budget and infrastructure constraints in 50 rural sites.^[36]
  
• In 2003, the Turkish government decided to create its own Linux distribution, Pardus, developed by UEKAE (National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology). The first version, Pardus 1.0, was officially announced in 27 December 2005.^[37]
  
• In 2010 The Philippines fielded an Ubuntu-powered national voting system.^[38]
  
• In July 2010 Malaysia had switched 703 of the state's 724 agencies to Free and Open Source software with a Linux based operating system used.^[39] The Chief Secretary to the Government cited, "(the) general acceptance of its promise of better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost".^[40]
  
• In late 2010 Vladimir Putin signed a plan to move the Russian Federation government towards free software including Linux in the second quarter of 2012.^[41][42]
  
• The city government of Largo, Florida, USA uses Linux and has won international recognition for their implementation, indicating that it provides "extensive savings over more traditional alternatives in city-wide applications."^[43]
  
• Iceland has announced in March 2012 that it wishes to migrate to open source software in public institutions. Schools have already migrated from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.^[44]
  
• In June 2012 the US Navy signed a US$27,883,883 contract with Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) Northrup-Grumman MQ8B Fire Scout drones. The contract involves Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 in preparation for the Linux systems.^[45]
  

Thats alot of money if Microsoft does that, AND they can convince them to go with Office.

Department of Defense still uses Windows too....

Don't think that governments are exclusive to a single OS for everything.

[HawkMan]

"The United States Department of Defense uses Linux - "the U.S. Army is ?the? single largest install base for Red Hat Linux"^[13] and the US Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux.^[14]"

AFAIK that is erroneous, from an old article from many years ago I remember it saying the DoD had their own version of linux with over 100 times more lines of code than normal distributions and it was all private to the DoD.

Most of that list is biased leaving out half the truth, outdated or plain erroneous. Some of it doesn't even make sense to be in such a list, what does embedded voting units running Linux have to do with such a list.

[adrynalyne]

Most of that list is biased leaving out half the truth, outdated or plain erroneous. Some of it doesn't even make sense to be in such a list, what does embedded voting units running Linux have to do with such a list.

Well considering the poster copy and pasted wikipedia, it doesn't shock me one bit.

[Dot Matrix]

If anyone thinks Microsoft is going to waste resources porting these applications to an OS that has zero market share or value, is kidding themselves.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

If anyone thinks Microsoft is going to waste resources porting these applications to an OS that has zero market share or value, is kidding themselves.

Unless Microsoft has plans to dump the classic desktop market and to focus on the consumer market with tablets and related products. If that is the case, they can dump the desktop while still monetizing it via their classic cash cows like Office. With Microsoft's current path I wouldn't be surprised if this is their end goal. To give the business desktop market away and to focus on the backend (via Azure, C#, etc.) and to go for a full consumer play elsewhere (Windows becoming a pure consumer OS).

[Dot Matrix]

Unless Microsoft has plans to dump the classic desktop market and to focus on the consumer market with tablets and related products. If that is the case, they can dump the desktop while still monetizing it via their classic cash cows like Office. With Microsoft's current path I wouldn't be surprised if this is their end goal. To give the business desktop market away and to focus on the backend (via Azure, C#, etc.) and to go for a full consumer play elsewhere (Windows becoming a pure consumer OS).

The desktop isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Microsoft developers have said that, and those who think a transition like that can happen overnight, aren't really thinking too well.

Linux just isn't worth the resources, and if people really believe this, just look at the Mac version of Office, it barely gets touched. Then there's the question of open source zealots who wouldn't go near Office with a million foot pole.

[xn--bya]

Pre 2010 versions can work more or less fine under Wine, although a native version would be sweet.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

The desktop isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Microsoft developers have said that, and those who think a transition like that can happen overnight, aren't really thinking too well.

Linux just isn't worth the resources, and if people really believe this, just look at the Mac version of Office, it barely gets touched. Then there's the question of open source zealots who wouldn't go near Office with a million foot pole.

Obviously, a transition to Linux for business customers wouldn't be done overnight! If Microsoft is seeing the consumer space as the future (as they have shown to be seeing it) then I can see them making this path. Linux isn't all that common today, but if Microsoft all but abandons the desktop I'm sure it will become more common. After all, the business world isn't going to be embracing Metro heavily anytime soon, if ever. It just doesn't offer the benefits to a corporate user that it does to the consumer.

If you need more proof of this look at Windows Phone. Windows Phone 7 launched with a LOT of business friendly features missing and Windows Phone 8 still lacks a lions share of them. Hell, Windows Mobile 6 still has better support for Exchange ActiveSync than Windows Phone 7 or 8!* Microsoft is clearly trying to distance themselves from corporate customers. Otherwise, they wouldn't be shipping weaker support for their own products...

* See: TechNet or Wikipedia

[Karl L.]

Despite the fact that I really like LibreOffice, I realize that most of the world uses Microsoft Office. Unfortunately I can't use LibreOffice exclusively until it supports Microsoft Office's formatting 100% (both read and write). Since that is not likely to happen in the near future (and Microsoft Office's ODF support is so poor), I use Microsoft Office in wine when I create or edit documents that people on other, non-FOSS, platforms will need to edit. If Microsoft releases Microsoft Office for Linux, it runs on my system, and it is not unreasonably expensive compared to Microsoft Office for Windows, I will buy it.

[Growled Member]

I've been hearing this for years. I'll believe it when I see it.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Desktop Linux? Desktop Windows is having enough difficulty as is, I don't think it's in Microsoft's financial interest to support other PC operating systems, especially one that has a completely insignificant market share. I just don't see how that can make sense. There are so many more promising areas of growth where Microsoft could do so much better right now than desktop Linux...

[Gerowen]

Sure, like governments will switch to Linux. Windows is too good of an operating system for them to switch to Linux.

Our government systems are pretty diverse. While I was in the military (Only got out less than a year ago), I worked on everything from Solaris to Redhat Linux to Windows 7 and everything in between. It all just depends on what system you're talking about and what it's being used for.

[Karl L.]

Desktop Linux? Desktop Windows is having enough difficulty as is, I don't think it's in Microsoft's financial interest to support other PC operating systems, especially one that has a completely insignificant market share. I just don't see how that can make sense. There are so many more promising areas of growth where Microsoft could do so much better right now than desktop Linux...

Unfortunately I completely agree with you. I think it would be very foolish for Microsoft to expend the resources to produce Microsoft Office for Linux. There are much better things they could do with that time and money. Realistically I think that the more promising alternative is full DOCX support in LibreOffice, which still has only a snowball's chance in hell of happening. Until then I guess I'll just stick with my current solution.