Hidden deep in a blog post full of PR speak, Google has announced that it’s bringing Microsoft Office to Chrome OS through a partnership with Parallels.
At Google, we recognize the modern way of working as being a cloud worker—on a browser and browser-based apps for the vast majority of the work day (you’re reading this in one, right?), untethered because the devices you use are mobile-friendly and cloud-native. We’ve long been saying that almost any business role can be a cloud worker, and COVID-19 has dramatically made this point. As a result, the Chrome OS team is working on new ways to make sure every company can benefit from the velocity created by supporting a cloud workforce. For example, our new partnership with Parallels brings legacy application support—which includes Microsoft Office desktop apps—to Chromebooks. More to come on this over the coming months.
The Verge has more details on how, exactly, this is going to work, and the gist is that Parallels will be integrated with Chrome OS to allow Microsoft Office to run locally on the device.
While Chrome OS has long supported Windows desktop apps that are streamed via the cloud through a Parallels Remote Application Server, this new partnership means the apps will run virtualized on Chromebooks instead. The new feature is set to be available this fall for Chrome Enterprise customers.
Parallels Desktop will be integrated natively into Chrome OS, improving performance and enabling offline access for these applications on Chromebooks. It’s a surprising, but welcome move that will mean Chrome OS will be able to support both Android apps and Windows apps in the future.
This is an interesting move, and I hope it will become available to regular, non-enterprise consumers, too.
Haha, legacy applications… More like full-featured, fast(er), and less-buggy applications.
My thoughts exactly.
> and less-buggy applications.
Really ? The few times I had to deal with office documents, especially if they were from older versions I noticed something wasn’t quiet right in LibreOffice and I thought, OK, maybe I should open it in regular Microsoft Office just to make sure and see what it’s supposed to look like and it was actually worse.
The online web-based office might have less featured, but I didn’t found them to be more buggy.
Granted I don’t touch Office documents often.
My guess is biggest missing part for the enterprise market is: macros
I’m sure some companies still work with office document macros, but I think most probably don’t anymore or at least want to move away from it. It’s pretty fragile stuff.
Lennie,
I haven’t used microsoft office in such a long time, but word and excel were some of my favorite ms products before the damned ribbon. Forcing the ribbon without a switch was a stupid strategic mistake on microsoft’s part!
I found libre/open-office inferior to the old versions, but better than the new so I migrated to libre-office and never looked back! It still has some annoying bugs and incompatibilities, but I can cope.
I used tons of these back in the day, however I phased them out as they were becoming more annoying & difficult to use. Oh well.
Can’t live without macros, specially on Excel and LibreOffice Calc. Went to great lengths to have a minimum compatible functions libraries so that most calculations I have to do can be done on them and also on cpp and vba for Autocad.
To me, it is a great disservice to discourage its use. MS should fix the security model on vba by limiting what/where it can write or interact with. I guess, this ship already sailed for them many years ago.
cosmotic,
There’s a tendency to attribute bad software to windows, but I’ve seen plenty of crappy broken software for android and chromebooks too. Someone in the family asked me for help with their chromebook – it was infested with malware. It’s a bit of a surprise given how locked down chromebooks are. You can’t simply turn on sideloading, you have to reformat the device to enter developer mode…
https://www.howtogeek.com/260075/how-to-sideload-an-android-app-from-an-apk-on-a-chromebook/
So I have no idea how it got infected without being in dev mode but obviously the walled garden is insufficient for protecting users from malware. There’s a kind of truism: the more popular a platform becomes, the bigger the target for malware authors.
Mostly it`s because of infected extension. My sister installed some months ago something crappy on Chromebook and then many popups and ads were displayed on that Chromebook and Ubuntu system, that had Chrome extension synced with Chromebook.
Streaming apps makes sense – they can use RDP or VDA licenses to cover the windows instance.
Running directly on the Chromebook itself, I don’t see how this would work unless they’re licensing Windows itself for every Chromebook.
If they’re using WINE or something then that might make more sense, but they could do that natively (or containerized) without needing a virtualization layer.
The1stImmortal,
Given that they are in fact targeting “enterprise customers”, that might actually be the case. Doesn’t parallels for mac work this way? I’m not really familiar with it but I’d guess that they’ll use a similar licensing arrangement for chromebooks.
“virtualization” probably means “emulation” in this case to cross the ARM/x86 architecture barrier.
No, this is not about RDP/VDA. That is already possible.
I have no idea how they are going to do this. Integrating Parallels Desktop into Chrome OS already sounds like something that should be optional because most customers are not going to use this. But how they are going to do this without requiring a Windows license and a “many GB’s” Windows+Office installation is completely unclear for now. This seems like something that is mentioned very broadly here but in reality will have a list of requirements that will severely limit this availability like:
* Requires Chrome OS for Enterprises
* Requires a seperate Windows License
* Requires a seperate Office License (probably only O365/M365 subscriptions supported)
* Requires a ChromeBook with X64 CPU (Intel/AMD), 8 GB of RAM and 32 GB of diskspace
Barely, and I wouldn’t call that details.
Possibly restricted to some models ?
Didn’t Microsoft port Office to Arm64?
Mostly yes, but that is not the important part. The important part is that ChromeOS doesn’t run on Windows or MacOS but Office only runs on Windows and MacOS so an OS has to be emulated. Since we all know Apple doesn’t license out it’s OS that OS has to be Windows and….well that is a big and expensive piece of software to run just for running Office
avgalen,
Re-read the posts you responded to, The1stImmortal was talking about running directly on chromebooks and that’s what I was talking about too.
I’ve never used it, but I believe it’s just going to be a chromeos version of what they already do on the desktop… more of a port than anything else…
https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
I don’t know, but I would guess they do the same thing as the mac version of parallels.
I didn’t see this at first, but all the enterprise versions are x86:
https://chromeenterprise.google/devices/
So forget what I said about emulation, I think it’s safe to say they use the exact same VT technology that they’ve been using for years via their mac product.
Someone else would have probably done this sooner if the chromebook wasn’t a restricted platform, google had to bless parallels for this to work. Obviously there’s a lot more than just enterprise users who might benefit from windows, but it may have been part of google’s terms that parallels is only allow to offer it to enterprise customers. This is just a guess.
It took me about 5 re-reads to guess that “that might actually be the case” refers to “they’re licensing Windows itself for every Chromebook.”. The first 5 times I thought you were referring to “Streaming apps makes sense – they can use RDP or VDA licenses to cover the windows instance.”
So yes, it really does seem that we are talking about running a full blown 2nd OS for just 1 application where the 2nd OS is bigger, costs more and requires more resources than the primary OS. I am going to ignore updating/mainintaining Windows here because I am suspecting that Parallels is going to use some windowing and folder-redirection to make sure you don’t notice anything from Windows and only see the Office applications
There is one other option that I see here and that makes a bit more sense but wouldn’t fit the “enabling offline access”. If they change the meaning of “offline” into “not connected to the internet, just connected to the local network” they could be meaning something like Parallels RAS. But then again, that wouldn’t fit their mentioning of Parallels Desktop and it would also be something that is just an RDP/VDA solution that is already available.
So, repeating myself I know, we really do seem to be talking about including a virtualisation solution into ChromeOS with the sole purpose of running Office and thus dragging the entire Windows requirement into the equation
Now that I think about it….yeah, that is exactly what Enterprise would do
Thanks, yes, exactly. The RDP/VDA was just in reference to the existing solution where you get a remotely running copy of office presented on your desktop, I was using it to contrast. It seems I just muddied the waters by mentioning it!
Every time I’ve had to set up Parallels for a mac it’s been “BYO” windows license.
Parallels may be intending on offloading license requirements onto the customer here too.
Regardless, a couple hundred dollars per seat for a retail Windows Pro license to run office would make this very niche, particularly when a reasonably functional web version of office exists.
(Of course, it’s also entirely possible MS is gonna subsidize Windows here to get it onto their competition’s machines)
What about data exchange? It was always a pain to me under virtualized environments, possible, but clunky nonetheless.
“Legacy”, meaning “it works, user has control over it, and it doesn’t depend on Google’s blessing to run on Google’s dumbed-down TV, I mean, Google Chrome”.
How is this better than what Crossover Office already does? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smf-SpGIzUs
Any Chromebook user can run full MS Office locally today: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos
Z_God,
One isn’t strictly better or worse than the other, they’re just different ways of tackling the problem. You probably realize this, but crossover uses the wine based approach whereas parallels is virtualization based. With virtualization you’re actually running a real copy of windows, so it should be fully compatible with most applications. With wine you are running windows software under an open source implementation of windows APIs running under the native OS.
The trouble with wine is that it’s compatibility is hit and miss (although it’s always getting better). Crossover developers offer to support any application, so long as you pay them to do it.
Like Alfman says, it would be better because it will have a “works perfectly” guarantee which is what Enterprise requires while Crossover Office has been in Beta for the last 2.5 years according to the link you posted “The CrossOver on Chrome OS Beta, which allows you to run Windows software on Intel-based Chromebooks is now open to the public as of November 7, 2017″
But for basically everyone that is not fully dependant on the full MS Office stack Crossover would probably be a better option with a few hundreds megs as a footprint, no virtualisation need, no Windows need and no Windows licensing need while still offering a ” this is very likely to work just fine for you”
“Any Chromebook user ”
Not any. Only newer Chromebooks. My Yoga don`t have Google Play access. Also my sister Chromebook don`t get them,