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Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
*TYPEY-TYPEY-TYPE*
Ta-daaa!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Conversely, I got modded down for linking to NeoOffice, which is... "based on the OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 code and includes all of the new OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 features".
It's very much a Mac program. Native fonts, copy-and-paste, printing, Aqua interface... Have a look.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
This is old news -- it showed up on a MS developer blog a couple of months back.
The interesting part is that VBA is not fully supported on the 64-bit Office for Windows, and is in fact depricated, which traditionally means that no further imporovements will be made and further use is discouraged.
Don't believe me? Go search Microsoft's Office site.
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.
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Not to mention that those "expert strategic moves" you mention are also "illegal anticompetitive moves" when carried out by a monopoly convicted of abusing its position, such as Microsoft.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I think you have underestimated how much of a productivity boon Automator can be. It is not really tied in with any office-type apps, but it is an alternative to xcode for end users.
On top of that, the menu bar is in the wrong place. Most Macs these days are laptops, and a top-of-the-screen menu bar is much easier to hit with a trackpad than a window-attached one. It also wastes less screen real-estate, which is quite precious on a laptop.
Drag and drop don't work properly with X11 applications. Even if Apple did integrate XDND with native drag and drop, most X11 application developers don't really make use of it. I can drag a link from Safari into my terminal and have the URL appear. I can drag the icon from the title bar of a document window into an email, and have it become an attachment.
X11 applications don't have access to text services (unless they use GNUstep, and then they should just be linked against Cocoa, instead of run in X11). In a normal rich text box, I can select some text, hit a shortcut key, and have it typeset using LaTeX and inserted as a PDF (great for equations in presentations), or have it evaluated as a mathematical expression, or have the words counted, etc.
All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11 applications. Most X11 developers these days use control or alt, instead of meta, and so motor memory doesn't work for common operations.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I use windows and debian linux myself. I am sick to death of msft's bullsh!t, and I have switched entirely to ODF.
As you may know, there is an ms-office plugin for ODF, but there is not a way to read ms-office-2007 file formats on Mac. And there will not be a way until, at least, late march.
Just wondering what you guys think.
If you'd like to try, OmniGraffle already makes Visio look clunky, and has for years.
Hey, guys....I read through the developer's blog. There's a section in there which he tells non-programmers to skip, where he goes through the gritty details of why porting VBA is impossible. Here's a quick summary if you can't seem to sift through the tech-speak but still want to know what's going on.
.exe file is formatted. Finally, the author kinda passes blame along, saying he just inherited the whole program from his predecessors, who no longer work at Microsoft.
First of all, a lot of the code that actually comprehends the VB programming language is actually tangled up in the GUI code. Second, the code has huge blocks of code that are written in processor-specific assembly. That means that they either have to fundamentally redesign the entire product or maintain separate versions for all of the different processors they support (32-bit PPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86). Third, he rules out the possibility of porting the windows version of VBA over to the mac because the damn thing actually makes assumptions about how the actual
When I first read the article, I thought it stunk to high heaven of Microsoft trying to gimp Apple. I still believe this is going to be a huge headache for Apple users who rely on extensive cross-compatibility, but unless that blog is a large-scale, deliberate, malicious fabrication, VBA is really an ungodly mess of an application.
Who would have guessed?