Slashdot Mirror

Hey Symbolset :)

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Were all back form the Hollidays at work and Ive been a bit busy.

Got it - thats what I thought you meant by Telepresence. Yes, thats going to be a killer feature in phones and other highly portable devices. I actualy use it often for personal stuff via Windows Live Messanger quite a bit. On a scale of 1 to 10, its about a 6.5. Sometims its a bit glitchy and the audio-video sync slips a bit. The WLM team is working on this and they understand the major issues.

Microsoft Office Communicator R2 also supports telepresence. It works very well, about a 7 or 8 on a 10 point scale. It uses a different stack than WLM. This is used day to day inside MSFT. Almost everyone has a decent web cam on the main desktop and/or in the laptop. For example, we have a team in Beijing - we use this as our primary way to work with them.

Ya - the only reason I need to use iTunes is to backup my phone. I use Napster for most of my music purchass, also in MP3.

Yes, office for he MAC is still around. Its pretty much the only viable office suite for the MAC. Apple doesnt sell one any more. Its quite compatble. The MAC-BU (Macintosh Business Unit) removed VB from Office 2008 for the MAC. This all had to do with the Macintoshs move from PowerPC to the Intel Architecture. You can find all the gorey details here. Here is another related article. It seems like they are putting back in for the next revision.

Agreed on the Tablet front. Things are getting interesting. Apple may be able to do what we havent - spark the tablet market. Well see.

Ill stick with my prediction - if the new iSlate (or whatever it is they are calling it) is Intel based and is essentilay a MAC, then it will be sucesfull. If its ARM based, and thus really a big iPhone, then it will be a very cool, but niche product. this has nothing to do with ARM, and everyitng with what people can do with it.

Best Regards
-Foredecker

Or maybe there are other, more reasoanble decisions, behind dropping VBA from the mac version? http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

And secondly, are people on slashdot REALLY complaining about VISUAL BASIC going away?!?

Has anyone actually read the original explanation for why Office 2008 isn't getting VBA?

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

Which makes it very clear that there are good technological reasons for dropping it. Or, at least, it's going to be such a huge amount of work to bring it natively to Intel that it's not worth it to MS.

I mean, sure, some people at MS may be happy about it vanishing, but it doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me...

Specifically, the news showed up here and here. The latter blog refers to the former, and both are written by actual Microsoft developers. Note the August posting date.

I think this sucks.
Note that this was reported months ago, August 7, 2006, to be exact.
Microsoft kills VirtualPC, VB for Mac

Here's the arstechnica.com forum discussion about it (started on August 7, 2006), with lots of pissed off users:
MS Killing VB in Next Version of Office for Mac

Here are two blogs (Aug 8 and 9) by MacBU devs Erik Schwiebert and Rick Schaut, trying to explain this decision.
Erik Schwiebert - Saying goodbye to Visual Basic
Rick Schaut - Virtual PC and Visual Basic

First of all, this news is over fives months old, and has been widely covered and known about since then. MacBU's Erik Schwiebert has a very detailed post and followup (also mentioned in the article) about exactly why Microsoft is dropping Visual Basic in Mac Office. The bottom line is that it was a difficult decision, and anyone who reads the posts will be able to understand why the decision was made.

The people at Microsoft who work within MacBU really do care, and really do take pride in their work. But overall, Microsoft seems to be making moves - decisions not made within MacBU, or decisions forced on MacBU because of resource allocations - that are strategically designed to hurt the Macintosh platform, but not appear to be doing anything overtly.

Examples:

- Killing Mac IE the day Safari was introduced even though Mac IE 6 was well underway and had been in development for over a year and was about to hit beta.

- Never releasing Access, Project, or Visio for the Mac platform even though enterprises (particularly academic institutions) have been increasingly demanding it for years. Microsoft's response? "Our customers don't want these products."

- Killing Windows Media Player for Mac, and making it look like going with the Flip4Mac QuickTime Windows Media codec is doing Mac users a favor, when Flip4Mac will never support Windows Media DRM, which Microsoft views as key to their future Windows Media strategy, leaving Macs unsupported (whether DRM is a good or bad thing is irrelevant to this point).

- Killing Virtual PC for the Mac when the Intel transition was announced after initially committing to support it, even though Microsoft was probably in one of the best positions to quickly release a virtual machine version of Virtual PC (can you imagine Connectix killing Virtual PC after the Intel transition was announced? They'd be jumping for joy!), and then subsequently making Virtual PC free (on Windows).

- Killing Visual Basic in Mac Office, which will make it DOA in many enterprise/corporate environments whose documents depend on VB scripting.

I could go on and on. These are all expert strategic moves, not by MacBU but by Microsoft at large, designed to hurt the Macintosh platform as much as possible while still appearing to be "friendly" to the platform (by continuing to release Office).

Fortunately, with Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and the forthcoming VMWare Fusion, new Mac users are feeling increasingly comfortable with Mac purchases, because they know that they can run Windows if they really need to, but often find they don't need it as much as they thought they did. For many, it's a security blanket to get them over the hump, and for others it does enable them to run those Windows (or other x86 OS) applications they need or want to smoothly and efficiently. In many academic/research enterprise environments, many people can't see a reason to get anything OTHER than Mac hardware now (especially for laptops), as it can essentially run anything. And in an environment where an institutions own IT capability will "support" things like Boot Camp usage, it's not a difficult decision to make.

Microsoft's maneuvering will ultimately be futile. Windows "won" the "desktop war" long ago. But now, as with Firefox, people are realizing that there are real, viable alternatives that might actually be better than the status quo.

First of all, this news is over fives months old, and has been widely covered and known about since then. MacBU's Erik Schwiebert has a very detailed post and followup (also mentioned in the article) about exactly why Microsoft is dropping Visual Basic in Mac Office. The bottom line is that it was a difficult decision, and anyone who reads the posts will be able to understand why the decision was made.

The people at Microsoft who work within MacBU really do care, and really do take pride in their work. But overall, Microsoft seems to be making moves - decisions not made within MacBU, or decisions forced on MacBU because of resource allocations - that are strategically designed to hurt the Macintosh platform, but not appear to be doing anything overtly.

Examples:

- Killing Mac IE the day Safari was introduced even though Mac IE 6 was well underway and had been in development for over a year and was about to hit beta.

- Never releasing Access, Project, or Visio for the Mac platform even though enterprises (particularly academic institutions) have been increasingly demanding it for years. Microsoft's response? "Our customers don't want these products."

- Killing Windows Media Player for Mac, and making it look like going with the Flip4Mac QuickTime Windows Media codec is doing Mac users a favor, when Flip4Mac will never support Windows Media DRM, which Microsoft views as key to their future Windows Media strategy, leaving Macs unsupported (whether DRM is a good or bad thing is irrelevant to this point).

- Killing Virtual PC for the Mac when the Intel transition was announced after initially committing to support it, even though Microsoft was probably in one of the best positions to quickly release a virtual machine version of Virtual PC (can you imagine Connectix killing Virtual PC after the Intel transition was announced? They'd be jumping for joy!), and then subsequently making Virtual PC free (on Windows).

- Killing Visual Basic in Mac Office, which will make it DOA in many enterprise/corporate environments whose documents depend on VB scripting.

I could go on and on. These are all expert strategic moves, not by MacBU but by Microsoft at large, designed to hurt the Macintosh platform as much as possible while still appearing to be "friendly" to the platform (by continuing to release Office).

Fortunately, with Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and the forthcoming VMWare Fusion, new Mac users are feeling increasingly comfortable with Mac purchases, because they know that they can run Windows if they really need to, but often find they don't need it as much as they thought they did. For many, it's a security blanket to get them over the hump, and for others it does enable them to run those Windows (or other x86 OS) applications they need or want to smoothly and efficiently. In many academic/research enterprise environments, many people can't see a reason to get anything OTHER than Mac hardware now (especially for laptops), as it can essentially run anything. And in an environment where an institutions own IT capability will "support" things like Boot Camp usage, it's not a difficult decision to make.

Microsoft's maneuvering will ultimately be futile. Windows "won" the "desktop war" long ago. But now, as with Firefox, people are realizing that there are real, viable alternatives that might actually be better than the status quo.

As far as I know the only real info released about the next version of office for mac is that it won't have visual basic.

I know lots of Mac users are (justifiably) angry at Microsoft's decision to drop VB support for the Mac, but it doesn't seem to be an anticompetitive action. Erik Schwiebert from Microsoft's MacBU explains some of the issues with porting Office's VB to Intel Macs, and it's a fascinating and eye-opening read.

Highly recommended.

People are confusing emulation and virtualization.

VirtualPC is an x86 *emulator.* Why would you need to emulate Intel on an Intel chip? What Macs need is virtualization, and that's what they're getting with Parallel and VMWare.

As far as VB goes, it never worked well on the Mac version of Office for a while.

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/07/news-of-the -day/