MS Office for Linux?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

	 It seems to me that what Microsoft has a monopoly of is not so much
	 operating systems as "Killer Aps" for the office. Everyone uses MS
	 Office because everyone else does, and they can't read what others
	 write, or write what others can read, unless they use MS Office.

The problem is a lot deeper than this.  On some other mailing  lists,
there has been a bit of discussion of Microsoft's apparent gearing up
to do a Netscape on another emerging  market  segment:   High-quality
sound  processing  software.   This  has litle if anything to do with
office software; it's a new arena for MS to conquer.

The discussion has been triggered by reports from people  working  on
sound  software (usually music) who decide to try a new music package
that Microsoft has been distributing. It's described essentially as a
"do everything" package.  The people who install it report that, like
your typical packaged sound system, it isn't all that  high  quality,
and  you're  better  off  as  always  mixing  and  matching  your own
components.  But - When they finish testing, they find that all their
other sound software is disabled.  They can't uninstall the Microsoft
package;  attempting  to  do  so  just  replaces  it  with  an   even
lower-quality  sound  package that is included.  They must re-install
every other package from scratch.  And if they ever accidentally  run
the MS sound package, all the other packages are destroyed.

It seems that, as with IE, MS has started the process of getting  its
own sound software included with other commercial packages. You buy a
financial package, you get MS's sound software "for free".  You buy a
video game, it silently installs the sound package.  And so on.  It's
highly likely that if someone wants to sell any other sound  software
for  Windows,  they  will  have  to  "market"  it  by  selling  it to
Microsoft, just to get off the kill list. It's the Netscape story all
over again.

	 If the specs for MS Office files were commoditized, the problem would
	 (largely) go away. They should probably be made a standard, and in
	 addition, perhaps, put under the control of ANSII, or BEMA, or ...

The problem wouldn't go away at all for people trying to develop  and
market  high-quality  sound-processing software.  This has nothing at
all to do with MS Office.  Except that we didn't think that a browser
was part of an OS, and it turned out that it was. We just might learn
that sound software is part of an Office app, and part of a tax  app,
and part of ...

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