This is remarkable, and impossible to predict from the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago. Satya seems to be the rare visionary CEO of a megacorp, instead of just defaulting to a defensive and reactionary stance like most other leaders.
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.
There is not much of Windows team to wield the wrath:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...
https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/
Read towards the end.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"
The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).
The only part of "Office" I really even use though is Outlook (at work), and it's pretty good at the job it does.
[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...
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 tried some googling but the results seems to be all speculation. Is this really happening?
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.
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.
Painfully (and randomly shifting) inaccurate in print layout on documents that involve more than just text, sure, I see that every day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It only really breaks if you want to customise it (or your hardware is badly supported).
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.
- 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.
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.
If you mean .NET Core as official open source, that's true, but it's a relatively recent thing.