Office has been available for Mac for well over two decades. There are so many more reasons for companies preferring Windows on the desktop than just Office.

I think there were so may more reasons. But what I see is all internal apps moving to be web based. 5 more years and Office is really going to be the last thing tying up corporates to Windows.

Linux as it exists today on the desktop is still a headache. If anything, if office were ported to Chrome OS, that would be a real alternative.

Office already runs on Chromebooks via Google Play within the Android container [0]. Is it then worth MS' time and energy to port the browser interface as a Chrome OS 'native' app?

[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...

o365's web interface is pretty much what you're asking for. It's a rent based model, but so are the desktop apps at this point (mostly). It wouldn't really surprise me to see an electron wrapper around o365 UI for a future release to unify the applications more.

The only part of "Office" I really even use though is Outlook (at work), and it's pretty good at the job it does.

Call me when Linux has anything that works as well as AD.

It does; it's called AD. :)

The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).

You just need a server running AD. Third party and browser SSO with AD is a solved problem.

Why would companies just switch to Linux?

Enterprises don't just use free OSS software like that. They'll use Redhat or some other corporate-backed variant, and in the end the license cost will be the same but most software and drivers don't work, users will need to be retrained, and support costs will rise dramatically. They can't even use .NET to build any internal desktop apps either.

It's a terrible deal.

I'd switch to Linux on day one if they'd port Office.However, windows licensing costs are negligible in most companies,compared to the overall spending on software.