VBA Will Return To Mac Office
An anonymous reader sends a pointer to Erik Schwiebert's blog — he's the design lead of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit — where he announces that Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office. Not in Office 2008, which started shipping earlier this year. We discussed the announced death of VBA in Mac Office 17 months back. Schwiebert says that the interval to the next version of Mac Office will be shorter than 4 years but isn't able to offer any more detail. The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
I agree. The movement times of things from Microsoft seem to be monumentally slow, and even after taking so long, there's nothing to show for it. They took 5? years between XP and Vista. They didn't really add many true features, and a large proportion of people would rather be running XP. Compare that with Linux Distros, where a new release happens every 6 months. New features are incorporated as they come available, and things can be changed incrementally, because of the frequent releases. My Mandriva box probably has changed quite a bit more than XP to Vista did in the same time frame, but it hasn't been quite as painful because it has been so incremental. Also, I bet they could sell a lot more retail boxes, and make a lot more money if they released every 6 months and charged $30-$40 for each release, rather than release every 5 years, and have nobody buy retail and everybody just get the $50 OEM license. Even if they only get 2 upgrades over the 5 years, they are still pulling in more money than they would only selling OEM licenses.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.