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Office 2007 on Linux

Couples of years ago Microsoft moved their website microsoft.com to a Linux based server because their lovely servers couldn't stand the attacks caused by a virus that kept pining their website which the virus was installed on millions of lovely OS; windows.

Couple of weeks ago we heard about the Office 2007 demo; guess what? it's running on linux.

Who woulda thunk it? The new Office 2007 Preview online demo is being served up from an Apache/Linux box!

When I first saw the story on CNET, I tried following the link in the story which took me to a Microsoft site. So far, so good.

The Microsoft site has a nice orange button called "Test Drive Office". Even better: orange is one of my favorite colors, as any Kerika user knows! Clicking on this button takes you to a site that's hosting the online Office preview. Which promptly died, presumably from the unexpectedly large traffic generated by the CNET story, although I can't help thinking that they ought to have expected a high volume of visitors given the publicity they were cranking up around Office Live.

But the way the site died was interesting: it threw a "JAR" error. Wait a minute... a JAR error did you say? That't what you get when a Java program dies! What does that have to do with Office 2007?

Intrigued, I decided to check out the site that's hosting the Office 2007 demo: I looked up "runaware.com" on WhoIs and found that it is operating from Sweden, and is not a Microsoft-owned site after all. Then I used NetCraft to see what the runaware.com site is running and guess what? It's a Linux+Apache environment!

Go figure.


via Kerika
[tags] linux, microsoft, office, 2007, demo [/tags]

Comments

  1. Dude!! What's wrong with you and the media??
    Microsoft have outsourced these services to someone else (Akamai) and Akamai may chose to run IIS or Apache or anything else they want!

    According to microsoft offecial release:
    "Our many connection service providers' infrastructures are diverse; our main concern is doing whatever it takes to help ensure our customers can get to the patch to protect their computers."

    Also, your title is missleading. It sounds as if Office can run -natively- on linux which is not the case!


    you love roumors, don't you :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. i got this:

    BROWSER OR OPERATING SYSTEM NOT COMPATIBLE

    Your Browser or Operating System is not compatible with the Test Drive System. The Test Drive System supports the following:

    * Windows 98, 2000 and XP
    * Internet Explorer 5.5 and later

    i am using FF on WinXP

    ReplyDelete
  3. Totally agree Qweider.

    As for the virus attack you mentioned; what Microsoft did was simply redirecting the domain Microsoft.com to other 3rd party servers (I think it was Akamai's servers) , which I do not see it as a point against Microsoft, bil 3aks it was a very clever move to protect their own servers..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gweider,
    Microsoft doesn't need to outsource anything unless they aren't capable of doing it and in this case their windows servers aren't capable of serving such demo.

    it might be misleading but in the second paragraph I explain that the Office demo served by Linux machines.

    7usam,
    I don't have windows else I'd love to see what would happen with IE6, please test and report.


    Rami,
    Indeed it was very smart move to protect their funky windows based servers so they decided to go with Linux.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ya zalameh ... Gibb ... inta wil linux taba3ak ...
    My other windows box is your linux machine ;-)

    Microsoft outsources many things. (I have friends in Amman who work on outsourced microsoft projects)

    What's wrong with anyone buying services from someone else? Akamai specialize in providing bandwidth. ETC provide storage. It's nuts to have one company do everything. Not to mention not feasible

    Jad ... ba3dain ma3ak ya zalameh taye7 bi sa7et Bill Abu Gates?

    7usam, that sounds like a valid error, since you're running Firefox. Who knows what's missing in firefox. I'm so frustrated with it ... but I admit, I use it too

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have to disagree with you on the fact that MS actually used Linux for their WindowsUpdate site back then. They just needed to filter out the bandwidth and the trafic comming in, which then they hired a third party for that, and they used Linux servers. C'mon man.

    And now, same story but a little different, MS is friendly with Open Source, in a sense they're trying to humanize their faces in the public.Remember their bloging guy that moved to podtech? And now the Ozzie big story? C'mon, it aint technical or anything of that sort. It's all business. You know that MS could buy the best developers and technologists in the world, you think they'd have a problem doing that?

    See that? They didn't go with Linux! they went with a service that does their job!

    ReplyDelete

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