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...'"

QUICK!!!

Someone get a port of OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] up and running natively on MacOS X!

Re:QUICK!!!

*TYPEY-TYPEY-TYPE*

Ta-daaa! [neooffice.org]

Re:QUICK!!!

Actually, when using NeoOffice, it is more like:

"Double-Clickey-Wait-Wait-Wait-Wait-Typey-Typey-Wa it-Wait-Wait-Typey-Typey"

Re:QUICK!!!

So *thats* where the developers from Real defected to.

Re:QUICK!!!

Everyone, pool your mod points and give 'em to this guy. I always found it ridiculous that OpenOffice has to run on an X session, it always seemed like a horrible kludge to me, especially getting printing to work. If we can get OpenOffice running natively and smoothly, and soon, we can give Office Mac users a real alternative that's not only free (which is something that Mac users aren't used to), but also high quality and works well enough to easily replace it.

Re:QUICK!!!

Everyone, pool your mod points and give 'em to this guy. I always found it ridiculous that OpenOffice has to run on an X session, it always seemed like a horrible kludge to me, especially getting printing to work.

Conversely, I got modded down for linking to NeoOffice [neooffice.org], 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. [planamesa.com]

Re:QUICK!!!

Everyone, pool your mod points and give 'em to this guy.

It just takes 3 people to mod someone up to 5... If you think about it, that's why there are so many lame 5 point posts.

Re:What's wrong with X?!

I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken.

seems you answered your own question.

Re:What's wrong with X?!

X applications do not use the native widgets. For things like buttons, this just means they look wrong. For things like text boxes, it usually means that the shortcut keys for navigating are wrong. If this doesn't bother you, it's probably because you use a platform where these things don't have standard behaviours.

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.

Meanwhile...

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...

And in other news, Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.

So half-assed Exchange support wasn't enough?

Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.

I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.

The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.

These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.

~Philly

Re:So half-assed Exchange support wasn't enough?

Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.

Exchange is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to a non-Exchange server. As a non-Exchange server, it sucks.

Really, it wasn't made with interoperability in mind. It was designed to woo over the Novell Groupware crowd, and then lock the users in to one system. Unfortunately, it's succeeded far to well, something even Microsoft admits. They've been trying to open it up just a bit more, but as soon as one arm of the company manages to get it to work with an open product (like WebDAV or mbox spools), another arm of the company implements another incompatible and ill-documented lockdown feature (like Sharepoint integration).

It's a shame that Novell decided to quench the pipe for the open-source Hula, which could have filled a pretty big part of the whole left by yanking out Exchange. But I guess that when you choose new sleeping partners, you also have to change the bedding accordingly.

Must be a slow news day at Slashdot...

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.

Re:Must be a slow news day at Slashdot...

So assuming MS indeed drops VB, what are they going to use for their macros now ?

I'd wager C++ or C#. Or, more likely, just any "dot-net" language. It's currently a pain to write C# code to automate Office, but if Office became "native .NET", there wouldn't be that problem.

A blessing or a curse?

VBA is a curse from Microsoft causing all sorts of trojan risks, until it's dropped. Then it's a serious problem. Figures.

Very old news, but typical Microsoft

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 [schwieb.com] and followup [schwieb.com] (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.

Can Microsoft even *do* this?

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.

Re:Very old news, but typical Microsoft

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.

Yep, Windows is the new Classic.

After a week, you'll figure out a way not to need it.

iWork '07

So apparently Apple has every reason to make iWork '07 a "no holds barred" release. I expect to see a powerful spreadsheet app and probably some nifty database or drawing thing to make Access or Visio, respectively, look clunky. Given how well Apple handled the transition from IE to Safari, they certainly have a good contingency plan for the gutting/cancelation of Office.

Re:iWork '07

If you'd like to try, OmniGraffle [omnigroup.com] already makes Visio look clunky, and has for years.

Explanations from MacBU devs

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

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 [arstechnica.com]

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 [schwieb.com]
Rick Schaut - Virtual PC and Visual Basic [msdn.com]

Re:Visual Basic is pass ....

I think the problem is that some users have code that depends on VBA, and they want it for compatibility reasons. Cedega is (somewhat) popular, not because DirectX is superior to Linux alternatives, but because many computer games depend on it.

Re:Typical Microsoft Tactics at work

Personally, I could care less

No, you couldn't.

Re:Typical Microsoft Tactics at work

and the old stuff runs fine under Rosetta.

Powerpoint barely runs at all under Rosetta.

Excel takes six or seven bounces to launch. Not acceptable on up-to-the-minute hardware.

Word eats 7%-10% cpu sitting idle. Doesn't help the battery life when you're writing on the road.

NeoOffice, while a great tool to have around, is so poorly optimized that it's barely faster native than MS Office is under Rosetta (sometimes slower).

Back to the topic... this move by MS is part of a continued effort to prevent Macs from making any inroads into the corporate space, which is MS's most lucrative market. After the next release of Mac Office, the consumers/educational types/etc. will be thrilled -- it will probably look gorgeous, run fast, etc. But business users, most of whom have brain-dead VBA cruft to deal with, will have no choice but to run Windows Office somehow... which involves a license of Windows, at least until CodeWeavers is able to make Office versions newer than 2000 run under Crossover Mac.

Re:DOJ should've split M$ apart after conviction .

Does anyone still think that the appeals court was right in reversing Judge Jackson's decision? Did anyone expect that Microsoft would behave any differently? I would hope the oversight committee is paying attention, but they're probably they're too busy enjoying a new Ferrari or two. Seriously, it's been said for years that had there been no Apple, Microsoft would have found it necessary to invent one ... but that assumed Apple's market share stayed insignificant. If Apple starts to erode Microsoft's customer base in any substantial way, Microsoft will take steps. This is probably just the first salvo.

But yeah, VBA is something the world should be able to live without.