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No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs
Techie writes "Microsoft has decided not to move forward with a version of Virtual PC for the Intel-based Macintosh. The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch, Scott Erickson, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, told eWEEK. The article says Microsoft will also be discontinuing support of Visual Basic scripting in the next version of Office for Mac." From the article: "As cross-platform compatibility remains a top priority at Microsoft, Erickson says that as the company develops the next version of Office for Mac, the files will continue to be compatible across platforms, including with the 2007 Microsoft Office System for Windows. VB macros within files will not be accessible and users will not be able to view or modify them. However, the files themselves can be edited without affecting or changing the macros. "
Fortunately, Parallels is still available for the Mac and later this year VMware will be as well. I don't think MS will be missed at this party.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I'm sure VMWare will rise to the occasion.
Oh yeah, "bringing Virtual PC to Intel" LOL!
how long until
Lets see, who is going to be using Open Office now?
Got Code?
Maybe Microsoft didn't like the "Hasta la vista, Vista" banners at the Mac show yesterday? Or especially "Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat." Perhaps they feel like they're being threatened?
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
That has to be one of the BEST features ever that Microsoft could do for macintosh.
My UID is prime is yours?
Regardless, I did not anticipate that the move to Intel would actually cause less compatibility in some ways.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I wonder how this will play out. One the one hand, this is likely to be the first version of Office in a long time that isn't a security disaster. On the other hand, if it won't run all the existing macros, then there really isn't much reason to choose MS Office over Open Office.
MS is actively fighting Apple, for the first time in many years. They're scared enough to notice, now that Apple is moving in on *their* pet platform. Great and good things are afoot.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Sure you can read and write compatible files with Ms Office. You can even run the "old" office under Rosetta with Support for VBA.
But going forward, Office 2004 for Mac will no longer be availble and no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting.
VBA is slow enough as it is, nevermind under Rosetta emulation. Now if there is no more support for VBA, companies will shy away from Mac even more.
Apple better get their "Tables" (aka their Excel equivalent to Pages) working asap. And it better be fully compatible with VBA too.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I wonder how significant this is, being timed with WWDC. Maybe MS heard about all the "Hasta La Vista, Vista" jokes and now they're firing back. (Balmer thought it a better idea than Gates's "Hasta La....Apple.....APPLE!!" comeback quip)
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch
I'm not much of a programmer, but surely they have most of 'Virtual PC for Intel' in the x86 Windows Virtual PC version? Could they not use the underlying code from that?
The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating [a Microsoft] product from scratch...
Or, in other words, 6+ years. I don't blame them!
This is a lame excuse for dropping a product, pure and simple.
Come on, the last thing Microsoft can claim as an excuse for dropping a product is that they don't have the resources to build it...
MS is the wealthiest software company in the world, and it can't *afford* to do some development? No wonder Vista is still vapourware...
This seems like a really silly thing to do - generally every copy of VPC for Mac sold would also sell a copy of a Windows OS to a market Windows is otherwise (except for bootcamp & parallels and vmware, i guess!) pretty much locked out of. Generally, more VPC for Mac ==> more Windows sales. Why drop it? What is the real reason?
Not important? What do you think macro viruses are written in?! :P
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... Microsoft acquired VirtualPC from a third party (Connectix? I can't remember.) They also have an Intel virtualization which could be used as a foundation for a Mac OS X Intel version. The statement that moving the Mac version to Intel would be a rewrite is undoubtedly true, but Microsoft could probably enter the market if they wanted. The issue is undoubtedly one of competition and egos. And between parallels and bootcamp an offering from MS here isn't necessary.
Of course, who needs VirtualPC: yes, it certainly “works,” but it is a clumsy product in everything from installation to managing environments. It sucks and if it were not for the fact that it is emulating and x86 virtual machine on Power, I would guess its developers had no idea what they were doing. Apart from that, dropping the VisualBasic scripting support is certainly anticompetitive. There are no technical reasons whatsoever and basically spells out “we dislike that you are competing with us, so we are going to eliminate your chances of entering the corporate market.” (I hope I do not have to spell out why this is an anticompetitive practice in comparison to recent actions by Apple.) If this doesn't prove that Microsoft are complete failures when it comes to technology, I don't know what will. Instead of responding to Apple with real progress (and, hey, maybe even releasing a product), they are behaving like petulant little babies and taking their toys home (maybe throw a chair or two).
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Eh. They've already got Parallels to do that job, and it works nicely.
Then you can simply install a MacOs-compliant version of Wine and run Windows builds of MS Office natively. Office 2000 is Gold status with CrossOver. And if VBA support in Office 2000 is not enough for you, I hear that CodeWeaver will announce improved support for Office 2003 soon.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Shipping a Microsoft Office version for mac without macros is just a way of removing support for professional users (who pay for their licenses) and not home users of pirated office versions.
The question is: if it is not used, why don't they drop it in the Windows version as well?
Answer is backward compatibility for pro users, so what about products like EndNotes?
Thus Microsoft got a way to go around the agreement they have with Apple for developping Office during the next 5 years or so...
I really think that this type of behavior is really wrong because it is anti-competitive behavior for Vista.
I really hope that the support for Windows Office will be tremendous for MacOS with a wine-like solution and that this whole story will be easily forgotten.
What? With the Zune? With their URGE music service? Apple is an MP3 player company with a strong distribution platform (iTunes). Their PC division is not their ace, so Microsoft can mess with it, but as long as Apple has the iPod (and continues to crush any other "iPod-killer") they will reamin healthy. It will take more than a few years to crush them, even with a huge warchest like Microsoft has.
I also think that if apple did some quality control on these open office programs, or teamed up with google/writely etc. - to create an online/offline office suite, they could really do some damage to Microsoft. d20 damage.
What some of the pundits (on Macrumours and elsewhere) seem to be forgetting is that what VirtualPC does (runs x86 code on a PowerPC by emulating the x86 processor in software) is technically very different to what Parallels and VMWare do (allow x86 code to run "natively" within a virtual sandbox) - even if the end result (Windows running in a window on your Mac) is similar. A simple port of VPC to Mactel would have its ass handed to it by Parallels and VMWare. So when MS say:
...they probably have a point.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This must be some new and novel definition of "compatible" of which I was previously unaware.
MS-Office --- the office-suite that is not even compatible to the same version of itself .
Hilarious.
I can see why Microsoft doesn't want to support Virtual PC. Now that Apple's on Intel hardware, it's easy enough to just build a Windows partition and boot to it when you want to use stuff like PC games, Virtual PC, etc. Remember, people need to buy software to make it worth the while of a commercial software vendor!
The desupporting of VB macros should be a bigger concern. Anyone who's worked in a large corporate environment knows that the vast majority of data crunching is not done in fancy analytical tools. Despite what SAS, Oracle and everyone tells you, many key business processes boil down to VB macros in Excel spreadsheets. Business units have spent years doing an end-run around the IT department because they either perceive the analytical tools to be too much of a pain to use, or the IT department is too bloated and slow to help them. That's the number one reason why millions of social security numbers wind up on stolen laptops. Data is pulled from the main systems into spreadsheets and analyzed offline. It's incredibly easy to write macros in VB, even for people who can't program.
Microsoft killing VB macro support for Mac Office takes a big chunk out of the cross-platform compatibility pillar. I can see a lot of other vendors using this Intel platform excuse too. My favorite example is Quicken. The Mac version is years behind the Windows one...I'm sure they're just wairing for the chance to drop it.
It's as if thousands of voices cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced when they realized there was no reason to use Virtual PC when there are already much better solutions available for the Mac anyway.
Haiku for you!
And what is the justification to remove VBA support from MS Office for Mac? It's not like the code doesn't exist? I think part of the issue may be getting a Universal Binary. Do you believe there won't be a third party plugin of some kind to support this, or Apple won't add support for this to Pages?
I guarantee you by version 4.0, Pages will be a perfect drop-in replacement for MS Word, which is what Apple probably wants. MS Office makes Microsoft a LOT of money. And Apple fanatics will be more than happy to buy an Apple office suite over MS Office.
When iWork gets as good as MS Office, it's time to port it to Windows. It won't be a nail in Microsoft's coffin, but it will surely piss them off.
Now all we need is Yellow Box for Windows finished and released and GnuStep to support most of the OS X APIs, and people can program in Cocoa and port to other environments with a simple recompile...
I'd like to see Safari for Windows. That would REALLY PISS Microsoft off.
...will be hammered down. That's all that's happening here. Macs entered the Intel world and Microsoft is none too happy. So Microsoft is going to try and find what tiny balls Apple has and give them a repeated and hard kicking. Good luck though because I know you've all seen an ant fall many hundreds of times it's size and be unphased. I supposed having micronads like Apple's will come in handy in this case. Of course, we've also seen ants easily crushed under our boots too. Yowie!
This was quite possibly the most nonsensical comment that I've ever read on slashdot. Most impressive.
Great. Now I have to spend the next 20 minutes scraping coffee and lung material off of my keyboard and monitor.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Thanks. I try my best. Good to hear some kudos every once in a while.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's not like Windows won't already run on Intel-based Macs, it's not like Linux won't already install, etc. Microsoft really has no reason to make VPC for Intel-based Macs.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
they didnt originally code vpc anyways so what are they complaining about
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
I don't think I've ever used VB scripting for anything. What is it for? I thought it was just for writing macro viruses. What do you guys use it for?
My Blog Sucks.
Note that, apart from the alternatives that have already been mentioned, there's also an excellent open source implementation of x86 (and more) emulation; QEMU (link leads to a frontend, original can be found here).
If all macro functionality is gone, it would be a large interoperability problem.
If you had any experience with VBA and Office 2004, you would notice that a great deal of code that works fine in Office 2003 does not work as intended (or at all) on a Mac. It is kind of a pain if you try to make macros that work on both systems.
So it is like disqualifying a guy with two amputated legs from running the 100 meter race because he did steroids.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Well, apparently, MS is pulling out of the Mac world. The sad thing about VirtualPC is that they handed some big cash over and instead of keeping it alive, they just killed it. It's just another company they silently bought and killed. I though that VPC was going to get killed anyway, MS didn't do any improvements to the Connectix version for a long time.
Finally they are killing Office too, time to get going for other options then. VBS is not a big deal, nobody uses it anyway (cross platform anyway) and it's not allowed to be used for financial calculation because it's not according to SoX.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Now all that Apple has to do is to get the VBA scripting in their office suite up to par, but more secure (ie: not as vulnerable to viri and other attacks), and it's just another feather in Apple's cap as to why their platform is more secure. Just imagine a year from now after the first really nasty macro virus for the new version of office is released into the wild and, lo and behold, it doesn't affect Mac users. This isn't a problem for Apple, but rather a huge opportunity.
It would probably suck anyway. With Parallels, VMWare coming, and BootCamp, MS still sells box copies of Windows (well, to "honest" people anyway). MS wins either way and now they don't have to waste their time programming a product that's already dead. Now those guys can go help those poor Vista bastards catch up.
Very funny that they (MS) made the announcement the same time VMWare made theirs.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Initially, this announcement surprised me and worried me a bit. I think I tend to agree that in reality, it would have little impact on the way most Mac users use MS Office. I, too, work in a smallish company (a little over 50 computer-using employees here, but they're critical to our daily operations), and I doubt a single user even knows anything about editing a VB macro in Excel. We probably have a few misc. spreadsheets that *do* rely on some VB code to work properly - but these would be special-purpose spreadsheets coded by one of our previous systems administrators, or an outside consultant. These would typically be for the purpose of importing data coming from a proprietary Windows app. and presenting it to the user as a report.
These, quite frankly, aren't the types of things that would prevent something like a migration to Apple Macs, should we consider that option in the future. Rather, they'd be headaches that would only rear their heads long after we completed a switch, and would have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. (The fact that I, as our current sysadmin, can't even tell you for sure which spreadsheets these might be should be an indicator of how high these are on our scale of importance!)
The bad part is, especially in larger companies, purchases get denied or put on hold for long periods of time over FUD like this. Some manager of MIS or purchasing hears the news in a trade journal, "Apple to drop VB scripting support in Office 2007!" and panics. "Who knows what problems THAT might cause us!? That's not acceptable. We need 100% compatibility."
"VB macros within files will not be accessible and users will not be able to view or modify them. However, the files themselves can be edited without affecting or changing the macros."
This sounds like a huge benefit! Maybe it'll encourage a few more people to switch, to improve the security of their Office environment. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but kudos to Microsoft for this security unhancement. Perhaps if this goes well, they'll similarly unhance the Windows version of Office.
Does that mean that the next version of MSOffice for OSX won't have a macro language?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
People are confusing emulation and virtualization.
e -day/
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-th
Such as NeoOffice?
It was released at v3.1 (not v3.0), because the Novell Netware cross-licensing terms only extended to "Windows 3.1". Once WfWg (Win16 v3.11) came out, Netware support kinda became a non-issue, so the next version was v3.5.
Bullshit.
There's already a VPC for x86/windows. They're full of crap and vastly overstate what will be needed. Unless Connectix has so deeply coupled the cpu-emulator, and the VM manager, that they can't be decoupled.
And it's been over a year since Jobs announced the Intel switch - MS has had all this time to check the situation out, I am somewhat suprised to be hearing this kind of announcement out of Microsoft now.
This sounds like a strategic move. Particularly as it's coupled with the MS Office Mac announcement. They're hitting the Mac/Office userbase where it hurts. Document compatability. They're making sure that Macs never make it into the business space where MS Office/Windows dominates overwhelmingly. (also why they don't provide a full-on Outlook client).
It was never meant to be.
Unless Apple gets their shit together and codes up a comparable, and compatible product.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Geez, what a shock..
MS buys Mac game developer, and kills the mac version for their own game console.
MS commits to continue IE devlopment for the mac, and then kills is when faced with a better competing product (Safari)
MS buys a long time Mac devloper, and then kills the product when faced with competition.
How much longer before MS decides to "re-focus on its core market" and kills Office due to competition.
The pattern is really quite obivous.
That's truly insightful!
Maybe Microsoft didn't like the "Hasta la vista, Vista" banners at the Mac show yesterday? Or especially "Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat." Perhaps they feel like they're being threatened?
No, they probably wite all that crud off as being what it is, advertising jargon aimed at the portion of WWDC atendees who are faithful acolytes. I'm a Mac user myself but OS.X+Mac is just my preferred combination of computer and OS, it's not my religion and to tell the truth I find both those slogans and the whole "I'm a Mac" campaign kind of cheesy. I'd like to go to WWDC some day just for the hell of it since I have been known to develop for the Mac but if I ever do I'll be giving any and all religious ceremonies a wide berth, especially if they involve hooded nerds and Apple logos. As for MS deleting Virtual PC for Mac it was to be expected. Microsoft is alot better at taking over established markets with brute force by netscaping the competition, buying it up or just steamrolling over it with raw $ power than it is at predicting trends and having cool products ready before the competition and beating them that way. This time they (and WMware) got well and tuly toasted by Parallels, at lest in so far as the Mac market is concerned and since the Macintosh VM market is to small relative to the effort involved to rewrite Virtual PC for OS.X-Intel and squish Parallels and VMware, Microsoft probably decided to leave those two to the slog it out over the Macintosh VM market. It consists mostly of reguar Home users running baseline VM products anyway. Microsoft probably intends to expend their energy on competing with Parallels and VMware on the enterprise market where the real money is.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Hear hear! I say mod the grandparent up too! Most insightful post evar.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If we suppose that Virtual PC was even a marginally profitable company, why would M$ actually damage what was previous competent company...
Consider the following
- Microsoft buys company
- Integrates part of Virtual PC to bolster server capability
- Gives away Virtual PC
- Claims MAC changes are just too hard
This has NOTHING to do with Virtual PC. If M$ hadn't bought them, I'm sure they would have managed to keep up with the MAC changes considering the number of changes M$ makes to its OS and the reliability of their APIS.
M$ bought Virtual PC to they could integrate their licensing into the server product! Thats the only apparent reason! The company on its own - without M$ could have done just fine. It may not have been tops, but it was a good product!
Geccie
No need to worry about macro portability. Just create your documents in OpenOffice.org and have them everywhere.
Just hope OOo macros will make it into a future version of ODF.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
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-b.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you really think such a major product decision would be made overnight because someone got upset about a poster?
Mmmm.. Donuts
MS will buy out, and/or support, a given software strategy.
The second an iron clad lock in is no longer guaranteed it will either be ashcanned or rolled into Windows as a "feature".
Welcome to the other side of the "Embrace and Extend" business philosophy: "Assimilate then Abandon".
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
"How ya like them apples, Apple?"
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
He should have gone with a car analogy :D
Virtual PC for Windows is also virtualization.
But does it have to be Apple? Or can it be Sun Microsystems and volunteers?
They ported it to Windows, where they use it as a training, configuration and administration tool.
Clear, Dark Skies
Damn funny.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
How much money did companies lose in dealing with viruses last year? (One reason to go through the trouble)
P.S. - A competent sysadmin could delete the consumer fluff from the workplace installations, and add the necessary productivity tools to the release.
Wow, you got an insightful mod for using an aphorism, since nothing else you posted makes any sense. VirtualPC was cancelled because it has two major competitors (one available now, one entrenched elsewhere). If they wanted to kick Apple to the floor, they would cancel Office. Cancelling VBA from Office makes no significant difference, even in a corporate environment.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Ain't the Interwebs wonderful: Swift: Webkit-based browser for Windows.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
From the eweek article:
What? Did they need a cross-compiler or something?
The announcement basically says that since you like Apple so much, now you can use Apple's scripting technologies because "the longer-term solution and support of Apple technologies is worth the effort".
The real irony regards ODF and is too rich for words. Microsoft said we need Office XML because ODF isn't good enough. Then they founded an open-source project to sort-of support a converter. Now we see that Office isn't compatible with Office: if you run the same application on two different platforms it's own macro language won't work.
If you ask me, this is a strategy of convenience. On one hand, Microsoft wants to make Apple less convenient, to sell more Windows. On the other hand, the Microsoft really wants to sell more Office, because that's where the real money is.
One the third hand, making VBA work on OS X is doubtless harder than it looks, because there's no such thing as a clean interface at Microsoft. VBA is supposedly just a macro language; it should be written only in terms of the Office object model. But if doesn't include calls to Win32, I'll eat my hat.
That makes the equation: maintenance_cost > revenue.office - revenue.windows.
Now I won't have to worry about Office viruses on my Mac. Microsoft really is taking the whole virus and security thing seriously. Thanks Redmond!
The reason VB support is being dropped is because Office 2007 is switching over to VB.net from VB6 based VBA. This requires porting the entire .net framework over to OSX. Presumably, the developers don't have time to do this even if they wanted to. Hopefully, it will be provided in a future release so automated documents can be used cross platform.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Don't know how far along this is yet (appears to be quite new)... but it looks like other people want to see Safari on windows :
http://www.getwebkit.org/
Well, he ignored the fact that you don't have to enable any Applications that you don't want your users to play with. Locking down an OSX installation is shockingly easy. So, he's either trolling or a complete and utter idiot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm still waiting for cross-platform WYSIWYG vector graphics. I need to work with Windows users, and they use EMF vector graphics extensively; it's the only practical solution when using Office on Windows. The problem is that Mac version of Office blows chunks when you try to render anything with any significant complexity. When I open these documents on my Mac, I have to wait ages for Word or PowerPoint to render the graphics, only to find that the graphics have been completely butchered.
I'm still dreaming of cross-platform WYSIWYG vector graphics support in Office--either PostScript or SVG. Of course, I know that pigs will fly out of my ass before MS does anything that useful with a standard that they don't own. At the very least, they could allow me to open a PowerPoint document created in the Windows version of Office and have all the embedded EMF files display properly.
One of the first things they did after they purchased Virtual PC from Connectix was to kill the OS/2-native version of Virtual PC. The Mac version was the next logical step.
So, what other platforms are left that Virtual PC will run on? Oh... Windows. That's a surprise...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
You might think that cancelling VBA will make no significant difference, but you'd be wrong for one thing in particular. It means that there is now no way that a large number of businesses (probably far more than you know) will switch to Mac.
There is tens of billions of dollars invested in custom VBA solutions in tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of businesses across the world. Everything from stock transactions to the value of your investment trusts is all done using VBA.
I'm personally very annoyed by this. I'm about to start a new job working with Excel on a PC and doing process development in VBA. If I want to do work at home I will now have to either buy a PC, work in a virtualised Windows or run Office in WINE. None of which are exactly decent solutions.
If Apple has any sense, it will now decide to lend a developer or two (more?) half-time to Neo-Office.
OpenOffice is nice on Linux and on MSWind, but the Mac version is very unpleasant unless you already use XWindow all the time. NeoOffice is about the same...but it runs native on the Mac OS. (I don't think Apple needs to worry about VirtualPC not being supported...but it should worry about having a good word processor/office suite.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
ok, THAT royally sucks.
I mean, I'm not saying that VBA is a great thing or anything, but it was the only thing that was letting me do any kind of cross-platform programming of documents between OSX and the windows machines.
You could tell me to just not upgrade, but I was really hoping for more support for it in OSX, rather than less. it's bad enough that a lot of features that are available in the windows version aren't in Office for OSX, and that OSX's performance of VBA code is HORRID.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
If I had to guess, it's probably because the VBA support in the upcoming version of Office for Windows is based on the .Net framework. Some portion of the syntax of VBA macros will probably work on the Mac, but a large part of what you will be able to do with VBA on Windows will not be available. If Microsoft advertises that Office for Mac has VBA support, it will be expected to be full and total support -- if it can't provide that, then Microsoft would just as soon not ship it at all. In addition, Microsoft seems to be encouraging people to write macros for Office in other languages, such as C#. If corporate IT goes that direction, then Mac users will be left in the cold even if they have VBA support (which was always more of an add-on than an integral part of Mac Office anyway).
Breakfast served all day!
Microsoft point/counterpoint http://www.apple.com/getamac/ ---537
VBA and VB in general, however, are widely used in Enterprise markets for rapid app development and custom one-shot pieces of software (for good or ill--- that's another discussion). VBA in Office is a common way to build custom apps on top of Word or Excel. As it stands now, these custom apps (more common than you'd think) work on either platform.
Cutting off VBA support in Office-X will take this cross-platform functionality away, and (they hope) make Macs less attractive to enterprise customers. "What do you mean I can't run my custom Accounting program on a Mac anymore?"
Technical issues have nothing to do with these decisions. This is just Microsoft circling the wagons in to protect against Apple making any further inroads into what they see as "their" business market.
With the switch to Intel, and multiple ways to run Windows programs on a Mac, the business leverage of the Windows mono-culture is on the decline.
All MS have left is Office now, with its millions of entrenched users, and they intend to fight like hell to protect that last piece of turf.
And if there is one thing Micorsoft doesn't do, it's rewrite software from scratch.
100 row spreadsheet comes in every day, user has to laboriously create 100 incidents in a web based system with virtually the same details. This takes 2 hours, the user can't do her main joband she hates doing it because it's mindnumbingly boring.
Enter someone who knows how to code VBA macros. As he knows that the IT department has far more important things to do the coder writes an Excel macro in a couple of hours that links to the IE scripting object and automatically fills in the webform based on the data in the spreadsheet.
All the user has to do now is hit submit on the web form (and I only didn't automate that because it would tie up the machine for 2 or 3 minutes which the boss didn't like). Now the boring 2 hour job is a boring 10 minute job and the user can spend 1 hour 50 minutes more doing something valuable for the business.
You seem to forget that computers are designed to do repetitive tasks very quickly. VBA is great for that. Copy and paste is too much for anybody (apart from you it seems) when you have to do copy -> switch -> paste 100 times.
I'm sure all 3 of Connectix's OS/2 customers were heartbroken.
It's *impossible* that Microsoft would have cancelled a niche product for a dead OS for financial reasons, it must be a conspiracy!
Comment of the year
Between Parallels and VMWare, there is really no need for Virtual PC. And I suspect Xen and various forms of user mode Linux are going to become available for OS X at some point, too.
Can't it use the versions of Python and Java that get installed with OS X? Or were you talking about the Windows version?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
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.
Well M$ may say that it is to hard, but i'd be inclinded to think it's just someone has done faster and better. I can accros this http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/m ac/ and have installed it for a group of architects using a heavy cad prorgam called Bently Microstation and it works perfect. Much better than the sluggish perfomance i experinced with VPC - only drawack is as of yet it does not support open GL for games but this is comming. Also great solution instead of boot camp, you do not have to keep restarting to use M$ app's so you can keep you e-mail open etc ...
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Yeah, sorry, I meant the Windows version. Most of the users of my scripts are on Windows, but I'm not going to start using my Windows machine just because Office sucks on Mac :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You must be new around here.
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Well, somebody has to say that at least once a day.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/downloa ds/sp1.mspx
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
There's nothing like ignoring 20 years of Microsoft history in order to make one snarky comment, is there?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
So you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that Connectix's OS/2 port of Virtual PC was raking in the dough in 2004, making TONS of money from the millions of OS/2 users everywhere, and the only possible reason Microsoft could have cancelled it is because they did some seedy things in their 20-year history?
Dude. I hate to break this to you, but nobody uses OS/2. Microsoft cancelled it because it wasn't worth the support costs to maintain it given it couldn't possibly have had more than a thousand users, and probably not even close to that amount. If Connectix had some financial sense and had cancelled it before, maybe they'd still own Virtual PC now.
Comment of the year
No loss. Microsoft could only make a second or third rate competitor for Parallels or VMware anyway. I don't think we'll need any virtualization to run Windows programs in the long run anyway. http://sixnine101.com/blog/2006_08/04_apple-cider/
sqribbles.blogspot.com/.