Microsoft products on Linux

To me, the subject of this post looks weird. Microsoft products running on Linux? But there was an article floating around the 'net yesterday (click here). Microsoft's Office already runs on Mac OS/X which is BSD-based. It appears that porting their products to Linux is technically feasible.

But would they ever actually do it?

I read somewhere not to long ago (Sorry, I forget where it was but I eventually got to it from one of the link on this forum) where the CEO of Microsoft stated that they wont be making Linux compliant products.

Do we really want to have Microsoft’s buggy products on *nix?

Not long ago, as I sat at my dumb terminal typing COBOL code, I would have predicted that IBM would never push Linux to the detriment of AIX. But events have a way of changing things and when someone says they're never going to do something, you have to remember "never" is a really long time (give or take a few minutes).

Microsoft didn't intially run to embrace the internet but eventually saw the error of their ways. I think they'll do anything that makes them money. The question isn't whether Microsoft's products are buggy. The question is whether Microsoft can make money off of Linux and at what point would they do it? How bad do things have to get for them before they proclaim they were really big fans of open-source all along?

Linux is already hurting Microsoft on the server-side. With a few killer apps, Linux could really start doing some damage on the desktop.

I think the next few years are going to be really interesting...

I can just see it now

Boss: "Great news! Microsoft has ported IIS over to Linux! So now we can get rid of that open-source mumbo-jumbo Apache and stick with the big boys."

Could you imagine the look on the sysadmins face?

Well it is possible and you can already run quite a few window programs using wine, but I doubt many people using linux would use a major windows application. Why use IIS when linux comes with apache? Why use SQL Server when you can use Oracle or DB2 or PostgreSQL, etc...

I think that MS might eventually try to release a product to test the market but when it fails to catch on in the linux world they probably wont release anymore.

Well, the article was speaking about:

which is possible (50% possibility IMHO), as Linux is gaining on the server market.
As an example, the biggest problem with SQLServer is that it runs only on Windows.
But I don't think that Office or anything else will run on Linux, unless in MsLinuXp .

Though if you count .NET stuff (which can be run via Mono's CLR and whatnot), then of course they will have those.

Well, asp is a pretty strong technology, and I'm sure many hosting companies would love to offer it on their linux servers.

The question is, how much money is there to be made? If MS offers their solutions on a nix platform, I imagine they'll lose alot of their server os market share, since there won't be much reason to go with their inferior server technology. Because of that, I see it as a poor business decision and I doubt it will happen.

It's just not M$.. To port to *nix would be an attempt to compete on the basis of quality. M$ doesn't do that, however. They FUD and devour everything that threatens them and then they steal the original product and release it as if it was their own baby form the very beginning. Trouble is, people are starting to realize that and that's why M$ is starting to bleed pretty badly on the server side of things. To port to *nix would be to compete fairly... that's just not something Microsoft's corporate culture is capable of, I'm afraid.

As for desktop *nix... I don't see it happening for a long time. Lindows was DOA (with help from the Redmondites of course.. oops! maybe I should get sued because I have WINDOWS in my house?), and, despite the nifty Bluecurve/Ximian Ev/OO1.0 package the RH8.0 ships with, it's still not ready for the average idiot... er... home user. Microsoft Windoze is easy to use because it doesn't do anything (oh wait.. my Explorer windows crash when I delete, copy, rename, or move a file... does that count for anything?)... what's the point of making a Linux like that... it might as well be windoze...

I read in a magazine a few days ago about the ways of running Windows apps on Linux. Essentially emulate Windows a la Wine, or have Windows running on Linux as a virtual OS. Microsoft should be worried as the first removes the Windows revenue and the second make Windows a second choice OS. The second also helps people to realise that OpenOffice is good enough for them, and this removes MS Office revenue.

It's sensible for MS to put their products on every OS, but their own... reason, how can DoJ do MS for a monopoly on someone elses OS? They can't say that code in the OS is tailored towards MS products.

MS is trying to ensure that even if it looses the battle with *NIX it will still have a fallback.

Currently MS says that the 'Total Cost of Ownership' is less for MS stuff. Mainly because experienced *NIX people cost more (as they are rarer).

When they become common (and cheaper) what will MS then do?

Make sure as much of its stuff is ready to run on *NIX and so then sell with the idea that 'You already know MS [product] over [Other product] so stick with MS'.

MS makes 85% profit on OS but if it gets Pallidium accepted what will happen to Open Source? (as it will probably have to pay to use Pallidium or MS will stuff it up like they did to Netscape)

There is no penalty that the DoJ could, with the information it has been able to collect, give MS that would undo the damage it did to Netscape. Whats to stop MS trying again with Linux.

I don't think they're going to be able to push Palladium where it counts though. According to the Netcraft survey (http://www.netcraft.com/survey/), Apache still has 60.8% of the server market with Microsoft trailing a weak second at 28.69%. On top of that, the Apache share had a slight gain while the MS share had a slight loss. This has also been the trend in past surveys. How much of that 60.8% of the Internet is running Apache on a Windoze system? An awfully small number I'm willing to bet.

If Microsoft can't push Palladium into the server market, it's almost a useless technology (well... from a sane person's standpoint it already is.. but I mean it would be a failure for Microsoft). I highly doubt Palladium will be running on Linux/BSD anytime soon (as that would defeat its purpose as an "OSI Killer").

Finally, they'd have to sell to the home market. Now, yes, a lot of people who are otherwise very intelligent become very stupid the instant they go computer shopping (how else could you explain the fact that Circuit City stays in business?), but I think the people who realize that Palladium is basically on the PC in order to watch them vigilantly and make sure they're not doing Bad Things (as well as cheerfully pistol whip them when they do) probably won't buy into it and will either decide not to upgrade or will go used computer shopping instead. It'd be like trying to sell a jail cell to a theif. Palladium's biggest pull will be that it keeps kids for copying that garbage the music industry calls "music".. nah.. it won't sell

I like this quote from an anonymous source at Microsoft published in E-Week:
In other words: Windows is such a tangled mess of unnecessarily complex (or as Microsoft calls it: advanced) code, that, even if we WANTED to port to Linux, we'd kill ourselves doing it.