Legacy M$ apps (meaning Office95/Office97) work well in Win4Lin. If
more companies knew how well this works under Linux, they might be more
inclined to use Linux for their desktops. Users would still be able to
use their Microsoft apps while their getting accustomed to Linux. It
would lessen the impact of having to retrain their employees. Employees
would be able to learn and use Linux on their own time or as work hours
permit and still not have to give up their MSOffice investment
overnight. I think this is one reason M$ is making their licenses even
more restrictive. They don't want you to be able to buy a license and
be able to move the app/OS from one machine to another machine running,
say, Linux. You can reinstall W95/W98 as long as you don't have
multiple copies running under one license. This is not true with M$'
latest licenses. Once companies get pushed off the ledge,
lemming-style, and commit to M$' newer OP's, there's no going back. The
newer licenses make the decision to change OS's much harder because the
M$ investment becomes a complete loss.
M$ doesn't just want individual companies running their software - they
want entire industries dependent on their products. Case in point, the
medical industry has had to deal with the fact that the bulk of their
transcriptionists knew only WordPerfect5.1 and knew it so well that they
didn't or wouldn't learn to use MSWord. To this day, WordPerfect5.1
(yes, the old text-based version!) is still the preferred way to
transcribe medical reports, although this is changing slowly. M$
doesn't like this dependency on legacy software, I'm sure, because it
inhibits the cycle of continual upgrades. This includes their own
legacy software. Allowing you to run your legacy office95/97 products
on another OS would give you or your company the opportunity to SLOWLY
break the cycle of dependency without disrupting the flow of business
and productivity.
At this point, running legacy MSOffice under linux requires you to
reinstall your W95/98 OS (not with Wine, but that isn't up to snuff
yet). You won't be able to do this with XP, as I understand it. Of
course, you could dual boot, but companies aren't going to do that for
all their desktops.
-Robert
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