Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Oct 2005 17:43 UTC
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.
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You seem to assume that the vocal minority of 13-yearolds running their omg-optimized Gentoo are representative for the Linux community. Sure, there's an MS-bashing element, but this is mostly in the userbase. I have yet to encounter a developer with such an attitude (not counting asshats like RMS). Most are very professional and focused on creating good software.
Apple and the Mac-community are not free of dislike for MS either.
MS wouldn't port Office to Linux, even if it was as easy as porting it to Mac (meaning one toolkit for example, though I'm not saying that's always a good thing) because Linux is much more of a threat to MS than OSX (in the enterprise that is). Not because Linux is technically superior, but because of the concept. I don't think corporations would like the idea of being locked to one company's fate, both on the hardware and software side.
Also, Office on Linux would just make the transition easier, and why would MS want that? If Linux manages to achieve a considerable amount of the market (like 10%-15%) MS might consider it. Today? Forget it