MS Office on Linux? Not likely

On Thursday, an executive at LinuxCare said he had heard from several sources that Microsoft (MSFT) is about to offer a Linux suite, a move that would spin heads in the anti-Microsoft Linux community.

"I have heard there are 34 developers working at Microsoft to develop a version of Office for Linux," said Arthur F. Tyde, executive vice president of LinuxCare, which provides training, certification and development support for Linux developers. "I don't know whether it is true, but I've heard that from a number of different sources."

Even a year ago there was speculation that Microsoft was preparing a Linux product.

But a company spokeswoman today poured cold water over the idea. "Developing Linux for Office is still not in our plans," she said. "Linux is still not viable and robust enough for what users need."

A long-standing criticism of Linux as a viable desktop alternative has been the lack of user-friendly word processing and spreadsheet applications, something Office could help remedy. While Microsoft could potentially make money from offering Office for Linux (if the expectations were not that it would do so for free), the company has little reason to help the Linux platform proliferate, as it competes with Microsoft's own Windows operating systems.

It is widely known that Microsoft has been hiring Linux developers, and some have speculated that the software behemoth could even be in the process of producing its own Linux distribution. But while Tyde doesn't think this is the case, he said he and others would welcome a Microsoft version of the open-source nemesis to the Windows platform.

"I would like to see a Microsoft version of Linux," he said. "If they played by the rules, then we would support them."

Sm@rt Reseller's Mary Jo Foley contributed to this report.