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No Office on Linux 'at this time'

Tags:
Microsoft Office,
Market Share,
Linux,
Linux Desktop

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Oct 2005 17:45 BST

Microsoft has rejected porting its Office productivity suite to Linux anytime soon, despite the growing popularity of open source on the desktop.

Speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in London on Wednesday, Microsoft's head of platform strategy, Nick McGrath, said that the software maker had no intention of porting Office to any of the Linux desktop distributions.

"Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows — we have invested billions of dollars in it. We have created Office for the Mac but, and I thought I had been clear on this already when I said 'No', we have no plans at this time to build Office on Linux," he said.

McGrath made the statement as part of a panel debate at the conference on the issue "Where is the Innovation? — Does the free software development lead to proprietary or is the other way round?"

The Microsoft executive was replying to a question from one member of the audience, made up mostly of open source advocates. The audience member asked why, if Microsoft had ported Office to the Mac — to tap into the Mac desktop market — would it not to the same for the Linux desktop which is rapidly gaining on the Apple operating system's small share of the market.

Analysts disagree over how the market for operating systems on desktops and laptops is carved up, but agree that Microsoft's share is above 90 percent. Linux has been reported to have a market share of upwards of 3 percent, and there has been speculation that Apple's market share could reach 5 percent in 2005 on the back of the success of the iPod.

On the specific issue of Office for Linux, Eric Raymond, a prominent figure in the open source community, told ZDNet UK recently that a release of Office for Linux isn't even that desirable, since alternatives such as StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are already available. "The important move would be to document all [Microsoft's] file formats and communications protocols, make the documentation publicly available, and make a binding promise not to sue or harass people who write open source software to interoperate," Raymond said.

Matt Asay, director for Linux Business Office at Novell, also taking part in the panel on Wedneday, said that Microsoft would never put its Windows desktop position at risk by building Office for Linux. However he claimed that the open source community should stop fixating on what Microsoft or hardware vendors are doing around Linux and let the market decide their fate.

"We need to get over our fixation with Microsoft. The question is not what Microsoft is doing; it is what are we doing? The open source movement is a bottom-up, not top-down, action," said Asay.

"We should be talking about how we can use the benefits of open source and Linux to leapfrog what's out there at the moment. After years of eating into Unix, Linux is finally starting to take market share from Windows on the server," Asay added.