Microsoft Office… for Linux?!?!?

You’ve got to be kidding!!! Yet, in a perverse way, this would make some sense! Obviously, if true, it would mean that Microsoft is REALLY feeling the heat of upcoming Linux desktop systems like SuSE 10, Freespire, and Ubuntu. I can remember, many years ago, when Microsoft released an Office for the Apple Mac… and it slowed Mac sales… why? Because it slowed innovation in that arena, and gelled the Micorosoft dominance of the Office word processor, spreadsheet, etc. space.

Microsoft Office for Linux ‘inevitable’

“Microsoft within the ‘next couple of years’ will release a version of its Office productivity to run on Linux, Stuart Cohen, chief executive for the Open Source Development Labs, predicted in an interview with vnunet.com at the Linuxworld conference in San Francicso. ‘They did it once with Apple, they will do it again with Linux,’ Cohen said. The OSDL consortium aims to advance Linux and open source. The organization employs Linux founder Linus Torvalds and is funded by IT vendors including IBM, HP and Intel.The software developer will be compelled to create a Linux version in a move to preempt the further rise of the open source OpenOffice productivity suite, Cohen argued. ‘They’ll go fight the total cost of ownership with a very inexpensive office solution. I don’t think that they will open source Office , but they will make it available to run on Linux desktops.'”