Microsoft looking to release Office for Linux in 2014
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
But Office, especially with its growing Web and sharing underpinnings, may be a more enduring product than Windows. If this is indeed the case, it makes sense for Office to be on every platform possible, making it the standard for document creation and sharing.
Microsoft is weak in the smartphone and tablet space. It makes a ton of sense for Office to go here; it's not like strong Office products on iOS would hurt Surface sales. And now with subscription plans and Windows becoming less ubiquitous, why not Linux?
It's not Office's job to protect Windows, especially if Windows can't protect Office. If Office doesn't go on more platforms, people will switch to other solutions because they are using non-Windows devices all the time. Windows alone will kill Office in the long term.
Sometimes in the startup world with all the glowing Apple logos, we lose sense of the rest of the world (heck, even the rest of the United States).
Ten years ago, almost everyone's computing time was spent on Windows. Now even people who use Windows desktops/laptops have iPads, Android phones, etc.
It's not a natural first option for writing documents if you're on a device which already has Google Docs, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office or anything like that.
In fact, most people will probably never even consider it an option. At least not until Microsoft provides a native version of Office for their preferred procrastination platform.
And kids growing up these days spend more (most?) of their time on mobile devices, running iOS or Android, or when on a laptop, 99% of the time in a browser.
The time when people grew up and learnt Microsoft by default is definitely over. These days you can actually grow up, learn computers and internet without ever once using Microsoft software. It's not that far fetched.
This is Microsoft's problem. They can no longer claim to be the one default everyone knows, uses and are familiar with (and hence prefer).
This is the definition of "becoming less ubiquitous". It doesn't have to mean they're falling apart and about to be irrelevant, they just have less of a market share than they did
Things to note:
- This could just mean that sales of new Windows computers fell relative to computers with other operating systems, but the sales of Windows computers in absolute numbers still grew.
- This could mean Window users are buying fewer new computers, but Apple users are more prone to upgrade their computers to get the next new shiny model (or upgrade to escape some Rev 1.0 issues that Apple refuses to acknowledge/fix).
Microsoft no longer has the mind share of either the public or the development community. The "cool kids" tend not to develop on MS platforms these days by choice. Look at Jeff Atwood, he was a prominant asp.net mvc dev (stackoverflow) and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse). This trend is all the more troublesome because C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?
Also, look at Microsoft's big pushes, bing and winphone 7+. Both have been at best partial successes, and they need more than that for a company their size.
The exact moment in time that is the biggest problem for a company facing potential decline like Microsoft is not when they have ceded the majority of marketshare to a competitor, nor is it when their revenues and marketshare being to contract. The key moment is the inflection point in their growth rate, when the 2nd derivative turns from positive to negative. That's the point where if nothing is done then eventually the peak will be reached and decline will set in. That's the point where there is still the opportunity to turn things around, it's the point where the resources are still available and the least work needs to be done to make a change.
Great times for Xamarin.
Just last week I downloaded the MonoTouch toolkit and will experiment a bit with creating a multi-platform (iOS / Android) app with a partially shared codebase in C#. So far I like the following things about the MonoTouch toolkit:
a) UIKit methods / classes are called more or less the same. Don't need to look up the API much.
b) from what I understand, it should be possible to create my own wrappers around Obj-C (iOS) or Java (Android) objects.
c) Create optimised user interfaces for each platform. This is the part where the code will differ mostly.
d) MonoDevelop is a nice, though somewhat sparse / limited IDE. I really hate the future creep of Eclipse and imo Visual Studio could also use a little trimming in the UI - otherwise a fine product though. I love Xcode.
Regarding your point about MonoDevelop, I won't spill the beans but Xamarin is preparing something exciting to fix IDE problems right now.
Fwiw he went with Rails for Discourse because the entire stack has to be both free as in beer, and Free as in liberty, since it's competing against phpbb and the like, which are both f/Free and good enough for most people.
For Discourse to take off in the way he wants it to, he can't risk relying on better features to compensate for cost differential, he has to eliminate cost differential.
If he were building another SO or closed-source SaaS product, asp.net mvcc would probably still be an option.
Apple's made no real moves to become more corporate friendly in the desktop space (and things like their recent blocking of Java definitely won't help them) and Linux on the corporate desktop is miles away from adoption (some public bodies which did adopt it have moved back to Windows).
People talk about the new era of tablet computing, but tablets are pretty much useless for a lot of typing-heavy work. Perhaps eventually a descendant of the tablet (perhaps something like the chromebook) will start to dislodge windows for lighter-weight corporate usage, but I believe it'll be a long time coming. Most large companies have piles of weird internal web-based tools which can't deal with touch, perhaps run on Java or Flash or depend on IE6 technologies, and the slow and cumbersome process of replacing them will take an age.
Edit: to clarify, right now we're at a point where it's rare for a tablet (or smartphone) to be someone's primary or only computing device, but as they become more popular that will increasingly be the case, and then people will develop new habits and new modes of use to fit these devices into their work or their lives. Meaning that if people are using them at work then they'll tend to have some way to use a physical keyboard with them for the times when an onscreen keyboard won't cut it.
In 2012Q3, 122 million Android devices were sold http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57549482-94/smartphone-sale...
Over the same time period, about 75 million PCs and laptops were sold, mostly running Windows.
Android is already beating Windows in terms of rate at which devices are shipped running it. If people start using Android devices for more stuff, and consequently use Windows devices less, Microsoft is in big trouble.
Go in to any office, literally, any office, and you won't find anyone working on an iPad or their Samsung Galaxy, they will be working on a PC or a laptop, most likely running Windows and for the most part they are happy with it.
Comparing the sales of Windows against the sales of Android is like comparing the sales of Toasters against the sales of Microwaves, sure, they might be at some level similar appliances but they are used for completely different reasons.
A smartphone is used for consumption, it is a luxury most people have or aspire to have and while the PC or Laptop may fall in to that department at home, in the office, they are used for creation (except from when we are bored of course...) and for the foreseeable future, that's how things will remain until the space is completely "disrupted" (whatever that means.)
I'm going to put it like this, I don't live in Silicone Valley, I live in a small town in the north of the UK, and every person I know and who's house I have been to. Every single one has both a smart phone and a PC, that's not just me saying it, that's every single person.
The reason why the numbers are so different is something crucial and so simple that we always seem to overlook it:
Normal people[1] only need one computer for their home and they share it, but they want to be in contact with their family via phones at all times, and the kids these days don't want a Nokia 3310, they want the newest, most expensive model, because they are COOL.
You can attribute it to whatever merely visible swing in the market you want to, but that is the simple truth.
[1] - By which I mean people who aren't in the tech industry.
Once this transition has been completed, MS will become a Software company like all the others, they won't have any home turf advantage anymore.
For this reason I'm very skeptical whether MS will allow the Office port. It would basically show that they have accepted their fate (which would be a good sign for their management however).
They either use a tablet, or their smartphone if the tablet isn't nearby! So the key here is convenience, which incidentally is why the laptop became so popular in the consumer market. When that PC dies, they will take a hard look at whether they really need to replace it.
The fraction of worldwide workforce that sits in an office doing work that requires both a keyboard and a screen larger than 10" includes about any office-person whose actual output is not just talking...
Windows is everywhere, but Microsoft only gets money when they sell a new version. New computers are cheaper and cheaper, so they have to lower Windows price also.
The mobile market is enormous and MS missed it (so far), but the desktop/laptop market isn't going away any time soon and they seem to be missing that, too.
Windows is a good desktop environment for the most part. But by trying to make Windows a monolith on all platforms, they seem to be rushing towards making it suboptimal for all platforms and ceding a market they are the undisputed owner of. Or maybe the mass of computer users will just accept Windows 8 as the new normal and put up with it no matter how much they hate it. After all, they've been doing that with Office for 20 years.
Most of us drones are issued standard Windows desktops or notebooks. But the story is far different in the VP suites. Many of them have iPads with keyboards. They use them, love them for meetings etc.
This has driven our company to find more and more ways to support them, since when a VP says "Support my device" things often happen.
Eventually this will trickle down to us unwashed masses, and we'll be able to use iOS and Android without having to suffer with Citrix Receiver.
Anectdata is fun...
Oh, sorry, I thought we were just comparing unrelated things to 'prove' Microsoft is in trouble...
So companies are looking at landing Windows 7 in Citrix and VMWare VDI environments. This is scary for Microsoft, as both companies are looking at breaking up the Windows platform into layers, and injecting their own platform tools.
Microsoft needs a landing place for Office that isn't completely controlled by VMWare/Citrix, which is the true cash cow now that the OS is becoming commoditized. So they are finally investing in VDI with Server 2012, and supporting Office via HTTP and alternate platforms.
If you think about 1983 vs. 2013, VDI is the green screen, and tablets are the PCs.
In the past several years, I've come to believe that Office is a much more potent monopoly than Windows itself. Of course, I also think Office is a blight on the software world and the sooner it dies, the better for everyone, but that's another topic.
The fact is, Microsoft can only maintain the status quo (and this has been true for the better part of two decades) by milking their monopoly so it makes great business sense to get Office on as many platforms as possible.
I imagine this wouldn't be happening if Android weren't around, but this move would allow a lot of people to migrate to Linux and remain with Microsoft Office, and I suspect that's exactly what will happen for a lot of folks.
Let's face it. No one wants Windows 8, and a lot of people would choose an alternative but the elephant in the room has always been Office. I'm all for supporting competitors to Office, but they will continue to fight an uphill battle against an entrenched and corrupt foe who does everything in its power to undermine competition, DoJ notwithstanding.
Given that people are not so much abandoning Windows for other choices on the desktop, but many are abandoning the desktop itself - Windows is essentially non-existent in the mobile market and its success in the tablet realm remains to be seen - this is another reason Microsoft should make this move.
I prefer to look at this as, Office is seeing the desktop as becoming a diverse platform, so being more available benefits Office. Linux and OSX are becoming more accepted as compute options in a number of large companies where Windows once ruled.
Office 365 for the cloud, another step towards ubiquity.
Will it work? Who knows. But being open to adapting to changes in platform demographics is important in the application space.
For iOS, we've passed that point, and I believe that Microsoft is afraid of passing that point for Linux in the enterprise.
If a decent alternative to Office gains significant traction on Linux in the enterprise then Microsoft loses significant Windows and Office revenue. If providing Office for Linux staves off the competition then it can at least preserve the Office revenues.
Valve is already doing mile-length steps in terms of upending one of the Windows' biggest advantages over Linux: games. Arguably, Office is another, but this time it's supposedly Microsoft itself who is about to diminish yet another selling of point of their own operating system.
I'm really confused, if that's indeed true. You could say it follows naturally with all the screw-ups MS made recently with respect to Windows 8 & Metro UI. But really, seeing a company undermine their own business so blatantly... I don't know what to think about this.
b. Cutting-edge triple A titles? No, not yet. Older, but well seasoned triple-A titles? Getting there (e.g., Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2). High-quality indie titles? Quite a selection, actually (e.g., Minecraft, Humble Indie Bundles, etc...).
Imagine where .net/visual studio/et al would be today if they'd been shipping official VMs (CLRs) targeting linux/unix ages ago.
At this point it's questionable whether or not office is really going to be the breaking point that keeps people from fleeing the MS ship. More so, there's a strong risk that it could work the other way, that people "building a life" (or a business) outside of the Windows walls could find that it's not so hard to live without office, which would hurt MS even more. Also, ensuring that office remains the de facto business standard for the foreseeable future means that MS will always have that opening to entice people back to the Windows platform, the same way mp3 players enticed people to switch to macs, iphones, and ipads.
In a hypothetical alternate Universe where .net 1.0 launched on linux/unix as well and they were able to gain a lot more traction in those communities then one would expect VS and perhaps TFS sales to increase concomitantly. Also, such an independent company would probably have a wider range of products for sale if they weren't tied to the Windows/Office ATM, though of course that's more speculative.
Windows is now merely 1/3 of their income stream. I say merely to reference how far that has come down over the last decade from the peak.
In my opinion... ten years from now, if Microsoft is still relevant, Windows will be 15% or less of their income. There was a Microsoft long before there was a Windows, and I'd be inclined to bet there will be a Microsoft long after Windows matters.
You can't make an omelet without breaking any eggs. Microsoft knows that windows will not be ubiquitous, so they are choosing for a smaller slice of a bigger market instead of a lock-in on a shrinking market.
Libreoffice is unacceptably broken in a thousand small ways. The best compromise we have come up with is to edit internal documents with Google Docs until they are almost finished, then polish them in Word.
Office 2000 ran great on CrossOver Office. I've used it for years. But Office 2000 is very old now.
If LibreOffice docx export does not work correctly (or import missed crucial fields / paragraphs) with the funder's templates, you might get rejected. Academic funding is already so fickle that I wouldn't even try. (Personally, that's always a major hassle, as I have to find a computer with correct version of Word installed and borrow that for some time.)
Besides, I don't love LaTeX. It is a very heavyweight markup and seemingly takes forever to get things "just right".
Of course, based on my painful experience, MS Word is also broken in a thousand small ways. Whether this breakage qualifies as "unacceptable" I dunno; I guess people are used to it and so have learned to avoid much of it. Yay? ><
Amusing anecdote: I have 2 teenage daughters. They used to complain about having to use Open/Libre Office at home. Then the school "upgraded" Office to the newer Vista/7 compatible version. "See, kids, it does suck, just like Dad said" (I got the "upgrade" at work about the same time). After which, the version at school was so different, anyway, that they just kinda got over it and went "whatever".
MS Office products are generally rock solid, while OpenOffice/LibreOffice have crashed on me too many times to count. Plus buggy functionality, etc.
I might be wrong, some examples from both sides wouldn't hurt :)
Or just use Mac OS X
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-3-0.html
However, an increasing amount of my documents are in Google Docs/Drive these days. It's only for really intensive spreadsheets I bust out Excel. I can't stand LibreOffice Calc. Even the name (in a dashboard 'calc' clashes with 'calculator' ... duh, I just type 'gcalc' now). Perhaps I'm just too used to Excel, having used it for so long now.
Make a specific Vagrant box and distribute it around the office. Easy peasy.
Plus, you have two OSes to maintain.
I feel that we are condemned to use Windows or OS X in academia, until the day that Office is released for Linux.
This would be very, very big news for me!
RS
I realize that there is a huge, existing market that requires Office, but I wonder how many of those could go through a transition and arrive at a better place without it.
* Calc's pivot tables is clunky, while working on Excel 2010 is like working on butter with a hot knife. No, it's not a "getting used to" thing.
* Basic stuff like filter/sorting tools: Excel has a far better flow that helps you get the job done faster
* DataNitro
* Charting in libreoffice is broken. I use ggplot for most of my day jobs, but sometimes when you need to pull up a quick chart, LibreOffice serves to only nerf your speed. Again, not one of those "getting used to" thing
* Try pivot-tabling a 1M row csv in Calc.
* VBScript (though that's now more and more subplanted by DN)
* Analysis tools - Excel is just so much richer.
These things LibreOffice is better than Excel:
* CSV (excel's a little clunky with CSV import)
* regex search
EDIT: formatting
Anyway, I agree with everything else you said, it matches exactly my experiences with Calc.
That being said I'd prefer Apple to push their iWorks applications over better OOffice - their technological basis is by far the best - the outcome of each click and each edit is completely predictable, the whole rendering engine works consistantly across all three products, so do hotkeys. They're just lacking a lot of sugar on top like the features you mention.
Google Docs and Presentations are good enough - there is simply nothing close to Excel and VBScript.
note: by this i mean interoperability more than anything else.
I agree with you about spreadsheets being used where databases make more sense though.
Now that is just a small subset of all the little corporations that use it for bookkeeping and what else (those could probably get by with libreoffice) and every other major company in the world.
Microsoft was also smart in moving to docx and xlsx because libreoffice doesn't support that very well and now has an even better reason for people to avoid switching, I'd like to assume they don't support the open formats for this same reason.
but
Presentations? That thing (whatever it's called) is just unusable IMO. Way too many clicks to do anything, crap looking standard templates, crap looking animations. Powerpoint completely blows it out of the water and let's beter not speak about Keynote.
So any manager / engineer / researcher probably won't be happy with LibreOffice, since presentations are just a fact of life and you need to be able to get them done quickly.
How much preparation did you put into your templates approximately?
How long does it take you to do a quick one-off?
How long for a professional looking presentation for public speaking?
In presentation to clients, I write reports/presentations per scenario/campaign. I use your bog standard Initializr+Bootstrap, the visualizations have been previsualized on ggplot, and then translated into d3 where it makes sense.
How long does it take? 2 - 5 days per report/preso. Like I said, it mayn't apply to everyone. I have the luxury of time.
I don't usually do the presentation (can't recall when I did one). Speaking in public (even to normal people on a non presenter basis) terrifies me
I'd be interested to see one of your presentations though, in case they're not all confidential. I think your approach might make sense for product launches for example - where it needs to look even more professional than the junk I do. If you're interested I could also send you an example Keynote file if you have a mac, just to see the quality difference.
I talked with a friend who found OpenOffice on her own when her computer at work didn't of MS Office, and found it highly unsuitable. In addition to ugly output, she needed document revisions which Writer apparently doesn't support. Even worse, opening MS Office documents resulted in strange, minor things happening. (No surprise there, but it doesn't really encourage people to stay with the product) Interestingly, she said the same thing I thought when I first saw OpenOffice back when it was StarOffice: instead of producing a better Office, they tried to copy MS Office and failed.
This rumor stems from a source in Brussels, Belgium, who spoke to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel at FOSDEM, one of Europe’s larger open source conferences. According to this source, who is presumably one of Microsoft’s open source developers, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014.
This is as thin as it gets for journalistic sources.
I call BS.
Even if they do port, I'd expect it to be broken in many ways, each popping up a "This wouldn't happen if you were running on Windows" dialog. MS just won't be able to help itself.
Just as an aside, I've installed Office 365 (the Office 2013 annual subscription program) and my tentative assessment is positive. I like the overall feel and functionality once you turn off animation. This evening, I found I really enjoyed the new alignment and drawing guides in Powerpoint 2013. They make Powerpoint a solid diagramming tool.
At $99/year for installation on five family PCs, the pricing is much more reasonable.
Linux has what, maybe a 1-2% desktop market share? Can you even begin to image the support costs Microsoft would have to endure to make this happen?
Assuming the article isn't just link-bait, I have a feeling the "meaningful look" is really one guy in a cube somewhere who drafted a position paper that he is desperately peddling up the chain as far as he can go.
Article is link bait.
I don't see any comments actually thinking through what such a move would mean for MS.
If I were MS, I'd be giving away an XP like OS for free just so I'd have a way to get Office out there easier.
One wonders if this is the strategy Apple has taken with OS.X. The value is in all the iTunes seats not so much the OS seats for them.
There'd be little incentive to pirate Windows if it only cost $25. If you want to monetize that further, sell support packages, offer a Backblaze-like backup service for a monthly subscription fee, and so on.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows/buy
ouch... the price for US customers is US$199 (AU$189). Don't know what's happening there - its one of the worst price differentials I've ever seen.
On the other hand, I've heard it said that MS actually loses money on Windows. Their real cash cow is Office and other software suites. So who knows, maybe they have a tentative long term strategy of downplaying OS competition and focusing on business applications.
How about marketing Surface as a solution to corporate IT departments trying to wrestle iPads into their Microsoft ecosystem? Windows Phone could be the same. They could be the Blackberry of the new mobile corporate strategies. Then just keep doing what they do best: build products that plug and play very, very nicely with the rest of Microsoft's portfolio, and offer better corporate support for those products.
Instead of trying to figure out how to make a slicker Metro, how about making Sharepoint suck less? Keep the direction of VS going forward. Microsoft's "next big things" should be focused on innovating the corporate workspace. Stop trying to get tangled up in the Apple/Google wars and start focusing on challenging things like Google Docs, Box, and Red Hat instead. Those are Microsoft's real competitors.
It seems like they're very conflicted and confused about who they are supposed to be. They're not the cool new unproven software maker. They're the people whose products you use when you want to reduce IT costs and modernize legacy application portfolios.
Microsoft markets Office for Macs for two reasons: because it makes some money out of it and because it prevents a competitor from appearing and taking over the Mac side of the ecosystem and threatening crossing over to Windows. The same reasoning applies to Linux - if Linux ever becomes a significant corporate desktop OS and LibreOffice becomes a threat to Office, Microsoft's value proposition starts to be questioned. Offering a reasonable migration path for companies moving segments of their park away from Windows to stay reinforcing Office as a de-facto standard is vital.
That is an existential threat for Microsoft.
I agree they won't make a huge profit from it directly but I bet it's a good counter-argument to "let's standardise on OpenOffice since otherwise we are subject to MS vendor lock-in". A couple of big government or corporate deals should cover the costs.
Where would such a mythical piece of software exist? On Microsoft's servers. It would be cloud tech, accessible from any platform, and would be far superior to any port Microsoft will cook up for 2014.
The only foreseeable downside to this is lack of internet translating to lack of office productivity. But in almost every scenario I think that obstacle is overstated.
That's the future of the office suite, not wasting money and effort doing market research and porting code from Windows to Linux (I can recall a handful of times that has worked natively).
I for one would do fine on Google Docs, but, there are many for whom that would not work.
I wonder if the majority of MS Office users are just unaware of the alternatives or nervous about learning a new application.
I guess we can expect this by 2030
I think Microsoft may generally be worried about the future of Office, or they're hubristic about it.
It's a shame because some Linux distros make Mac OS X and Windows look like a joke. Have you tried http://elementaryos.org/? it's like warm pillow on a cold night. A brilliant example of UI done right.
I'm excited to see Steam come to Linux. If Office were to come, it Desktop Linux has a bright future.
I use Google Docs for everything. It's simpler to use, it's simpler to share documents, it's inherently more mobile. The updates are instant. And so on.
Now I would be glad if there was free (as-in-speech) alternative to Google Docs, so I could just host it myself on my server. There IS etherpad, but it doesn't do tables and works slightly differently.
What do others think? Are "offline" office suites still relevant?
There really is nothing comparable to the Office suite when it comes to features and interoperability. Yes, it has its quirks, but you just can't make the other products do what the Office products can do.
I envisage Word becoming more of a publishing application for those few people in a company who need to make publishable documents. The rest of us will survive with only ~16 fonts.
However, we still use Windows - why? Not because of Office - but because the only proper accounting suite available in this country runs only on Windows,and it's server can only use MSSQL as the database. Therefore, we have to use Windows as a company, even without Office.
But to MSFT this is suicide: even if Office remains the leading suite with a Linux version every company out there can save millions a year switching to a distro and paying only for Office, but not for Windows.
This is basically Nintendo giving away Mario and Zelda to other consoles.
Do any of the newer divisions at MSFT make any money? Xbox probably but there is no way Winphone and web are bringing any cash.
The only drawback, of course, is that it would weaken the need for Windows itself. But, given the disasters that have been Vista and Windows 8, maybe they should look at long term survival rather than tying themselves to that particular anchor?
They could even call it Lindows ;-)
[yes, I know]
Well, I thought linux just bases the kernel of the operating system(Android), in which case porting Microsoft Office has nothing to do with porting to desktop linus, unless it's written in C :)
To my knowledge, Office is one of their main profit centers, to the point of Windows being a deliver platform for Office. So, I could see cannibalizing some Windows sales to boost Office.
The Microsoft of today has nothing to lose from this. 20 years ago the situation was different. A must-have app like Office was all that was keeping people from switching to a wide variety of competing OSes. But it's 2013 and the battle has been won. For all the hate that people heap upon Microsoft, they dominate the most profitable sector of the personal computing market. Their strategic position doesn't depend on any one piece of software.
If anything, I think this move demonstrates how confident they are. In the past Office for linux would have been confounding, for both business and ideological reasons. This is the tech company version of dismantling the ICBMS. The OS cold war is over, and everyone can go back to business.
Microsoft should concentrate more on Web product 'Office360' rather trying to rewrite Office for Linux.
Instead, their resources would be better spent creating a Google docs killer freemium service. But what do I know...
It's still pointless though. I don't think the kernel is Windows' biggest problem, or even necessarily a problem.
Supporting Linux seems pointless. Linux has a really small market share. I am fairly sure a lot of Linux users who are tech savvy would want to support the open source Libre Office instead of forking out for MS Office.
Better places to expand would be Android / iOS app stores. Tablet devices are still exploding in growth. I could see a lot of use being got out of office software on tablets.
I can't fully understand why I find this so funny but I am just falling out of my seat laughing.
While I find this extremely comical, I am excited to see the consequences of this for desktop linux. The way I see it, the more people who use linux the better it will become :).
RS
Next step: .NET