Microsoft to release Office for Linux ?

[CharlesA]

For some tasks, Access can be very useful as a front-end to PostgreSQL via the ODBC driver. I have a database with many relational tables and sometimes find it easier to design a complex, multi-table query using the Access GUI than writing a lengthy SQL statement by hand. You can tell Access to display a query in SQL and then copy it into a script for later use or use it to create a view. It also provides a convenient method to import spreadsheets into an existing database.

I took a class that used Access to do exactly that. It was.. interesting to say the least. I don't think I've touched Access again.

[Copper Bezel]

No, I think you're right in the sense that LibreOffice should stop following Microsoft's lead and think entirely in terms of the needs of its own user base.

We've done well in Linux when we address a problem from our own perspective with our own strengths and not sought to replicate what other OS's have.

Yeah, that's what I'm on about. I feel that most major end-user apps on Linux manage more or less to do that, and I don't see it in LibreOffice. I'm not really sure who they're marketing toward, but it's definitely not the home users that Ubuntu and Gnome are targeting these days.

I'm not really sure who is LibreOffice's user base, though. I suppose it's also possible that they're just not the project we should be looking to as the home-use office suite (but if that's the case, the ideal fit is still a product that doesn't yet exist.) I honestly felt like there was some fear that services like Google Drive and Office 365 would take over as the only ways of doing word processing on home computers, but I don't think that's bearing out, and I still think there's a real value in a home-use-targeted office suite.

I don't think it's fair though that you don't rate desktop Linux. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are fully viable for conventional desktop computing.

Yeah, that was a cheap shot. But no desktop Linux is a market player the way those four are, so we end up with this sense of either panic (Gnome) or contingency planning for sudden and astronomically unlikely success (Ubuntu) in the desktop Linux world.

[llanitedave]

The last innovative thing that LibreOffice (then OpenOffice) did was to implement an open XML standard for their document filetypes. Microsoft cloned it within a year. That's because OpenOffice had brought a new, sellable feature to market. It was a very good thing. We now have a thread on the release of LibreOffice 4.0 (which, I'll admit, I took the trouble to install.) See anything in the release notes that looks like a threat to Microsoft Office? I mean, hey, you can skin it now, right? That's innovation! Gee golly, I'll never use my computer the same way again.

I guess that makes MS Office the knockoff, then. Right?

[Copper Bezel]

No, it means that OOXML is a knockoff of ODF. A fairly blatant one, really, and a rather nasty land-grab by Microsoft when they easily could have just adopted ODF (and presumably 3E'd it.)

Seriously, I just don't see this as a normal competitive relationship between two pieces of software. If Android gets X feature, the next version of iOS will probably have some equivalent, and that's cool. The reverse is generally true. But LibreOffice gets its five-year goals from the latest MSO's release notes. And then the format fight and IBM getting ISO to accept ODF, triggering Microsoft to engineer OOXML on the same plan and take it to ISO as well, was OO finally actually doing something original, but also something with some political power to it, and MS moving to quash it.

Of course, the resulting situation is fairly a silly mess of principle and spite. Microsoft could have been a community member (hah) and just adopted the de jure standard of ODF in 2005, or the Open Document Foundation could have realized that they got what they wanted, an open XML archive format for all documents ever as a de facto standard, and dropped ODF in favor of OOXML. Either one can still do this right now, and consumers of both products would still immediately benefit.