With Office 365 in the browser, and now Internet Explorer-only apps now available on Linux, I wonder what remains to prevent most companies/administrations to use a Linux distribution as their main OS.
Office 365 in browser sucks. What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? There really isn't a reason to switch for most people, its a lot of pain for not much benefit. A better question is what do they gain?
Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice.
> What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for?
Every internal corporate web app developed in the 2000s, all custom built, developed by external contractors and not actively maintained because “they work” (or at least their bugs are well known and worked around). In my wife's department alone, there's like a dozen of such apps (for holiday tracking, training scheduling, etc, etc.). It's also discussed in the article btw:
“We had so many applications that still depend on Internet Explorer,” Ronny Intrau, Browser Product Manager at Bundesagentur für Arbeit
> A better question is what do they gain?
Companies and administrations have had enormous troubles migrating away from Windows XP when the support ended (and some haven't actually, because they just couldn't afford it). Windows 7 support ends in January 2023, and with Windows 11 we now know that the promise to have Windows 10 forever was a lie, and that they'll need to migrate yet again (while throwing away a good amount of PC, because of the system requirements, as it's always the case with such migrations). We're talking of migrations costing tens or hundreds of millions for public administrations. Never going through this all over again is a win.
>Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice.
I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO.
I had no idea they decided that they should make apps for IE. They don't even seem hard to replace with a random app or a calendar. Why are they so unique or needed?
They could easily just have a server and run Windows as VMs and never have issues. Lots of places still use XP or something on an intranet, and even on the internet a VM version won't pose any dangers.
> I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO.
I assume you haven't opened more than a handful of .doc documents then, because around 70% of the .doc documents I open are either broken when I open them (around 20% of the time), or when the other party open them after I edited them (around 50% of the time). In practice docx docs seems to work a little bit better, but not that much (I'd say 50 to 60% failure). And I say that as a Linux user for 14 years now. Until MS365 came, MS Word documents where constant frustration.
Oh, is it? That would definitely make sense, because they really don't want their captive customers running away so easily when migrating away from Windows 7.
I don’t think it’s very realistic that Microsoft would port the whole Trident engine along with all the involved technologies used by a lot of these legacy apps (activex, VBScript, ms office and active directory integration, etc.) to linux. Especially at the end of its life.
end user and IT familiarity. sure you know Linux, most end users and a lot of IT folks don't.
that and corporate VPN security stuff. I know the company I work for uses FireEye (whatever that is) to make sure I'm up to no good or whatever it does. every time i bring up Linux I get the "VPN software" and "Security" as the biggest reasons why I need to just be happy with Win10 + WSL2 (which honestly isn't bad at all)
That's a good point. I wonder how many there are left. From what I've seen, most apps developed after say 2007 or something were web-based, but since I was a web developer when I was dealing with such things, my PoV is obviously biased.
Which fraction would work flawlessly with Wine is also a question.
