Re: [tlug] CrossOver Office

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Michael ENGEL (michael-engel@example.com) wrote:

> I just read the following on Fred Langa's Newsletter:

Don't know who that is, but Fred's a bit slow: that was announced about
about three weeks ago on Freshmeat :-)

> But (you knew there was a "but" coming, right? <g>) CrossOver Office
> costs $65 on CD ($55 for a download-only version), which is a
> significant fraction of the cost of just going out and buying a new copy
> of Windows.

No, the "but" is that it lets you run Office and IE, which is hard to view
as much of a good thing in itself, or as good for the advancement of
native Linux apps.   Why would I want to run MS Word when I can choose
Kword or Abiword, or others?  Why run IE when I can use Konqueror or Mozilla?
We have good alternatives that work, and are cheap/free/Free.

$65 may be significant percentage of the cost of actually buying a copy
of Windows, but that's not the real money point: the real money point
is the hundreds of dollars you'd have to spend to get a copy of MS Office.
Windows itself is relatively cheap.  You may even have a copy that came
bundled with a PC you bought.

> There will be cases where CrossOver Office will be a great fit, but
> because of the pricing, it seems to me to be a niche product, and not
> the "breakout" utility that will let Linux leapfrog into truly common
> use.

Even if if were free, it wouldn't matter.  Think about it: Linux already
has perfectly capable office software that covers all the major functions
you'd expect in an office suite, and it's available for free.  It
has Netscape, it has Mozilla, it has Konqueror and Opera.  It doesn't
particularly need Internet Exploder or MS Awful, and being able to
run these apps natively would make little difference to the popularity
of Linux, even for free.  Look around you at the people running Linux:
how many of them (us) want to run MS applications?  How many of them (us)
would do so even if Codeweavers gave us the plugin for free and MS 
offered us Office for free?  Very few, if any.

People who expect Linux to suddenly make a "great leap forward" are
expecting something that won't happen.  Linux' progress has been steady
going: every year it is found on more servers and more desktops than
the year before.   At some point, you'll probably find that Linux, in total,
has a larger installed base than MacOS.  It may already be there, although
it's very hard to count the installed base of Linux accurately.  At some
point after that, Linux will have a larger *desktop* installed base than
MacOS.  It's probably already a lot closer to that than many people think.

Linux may take over the dekstop.  Like many, I'm not certain that's a good thing,
but it may happen.  If it does, it won't happen because of being able to run
MS software.  The only Windows app I run under Wine is 3Com Total Control
Manager (b/c there is no Linux version of that, and no workalike), which
lately has been working pretty well.  It's only in the past few months that
it has worked at all.  TCM is a highly specialize app, though, of interest
only to admins who run 3Com (formerly USR) RAS gear.  Most Linux users 
have no need for something this specialized, so they have plenty of
alternatives to choose from in the native Linux world.

Jonathan