No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs 296
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. "
VPC isn't the only virtualization solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Less software? (Score:2)
Re:Less software? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Less software? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:
Wait - that's the only one. It already runs on an Intel platform. The codebase already exists. Starting from scratch is a load of crock that's an easy excuse for slowly closing down any support for OSX, considering that MS is loosing market share EVERYWHERE.
Yeah, they're stil
Re:Less software? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Less software? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft wanted to port VirtualPC to the Mac, then they could use the peripheral support code from the Mac VirtualPC and the x86 virtualisation code from the Windows version. The 'only' thing they would have to do is write the glue code. In principle, this is nice and easy. In practice, it was several years since the Windows version was first released, and I have no idea how separate the development of the two products has diverged. It may be that it is easier to re-write the OS X-specific code than to import it from Mac VirtualPC due to diverging codebases. If this is the case, then it is almost certainly not worth the investment.
Mac VirtualPC on PowerPC had no competition. There was SoftWindows (later RealPC), but it doesn't exist anymore. If you wanted to run x86 software on OS X (PowerPC) then VirutualPC was really the only option. The Mac virtualisation market is a lot more crowded. Parallels have a very good product which they sell quite cheaply. They were first-to-market and have a lot of mindshare. VMWare has good brand-recognition and is coming soon to Mac. If they follow their pricing policy, then it will be free on OS X. VirtualPC on OS X86 would have to compete with these, and so would likely not be able to sell at anything like its current price, and might have to be free.
VirtualPC x86 currently doesn't run on anything other than Windows, because Microsoft want to ensure that you have at least one copy of Windows running. There is no Linux version, for example. Not porting it to OS X86 is a continuation of this.
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Less software? (Score:2)
VPC yes, but VBA is not as popular as you might think. I used to work in a very large all-Mac organization - over 1000 employees, all of 'em on Macs. In two years+ there, I never saw a single VBA macro. Plenty of AppleScript, but no VBA. Obviously that's just one anecdote, but if it *is* representative then dropping VBA support for MacOffice is actually a pretty good decision - why pour development $$ into something y
Strategic (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Less software? (Score:2, Troll)
All they've done is put their sticker on it and now they actually have to tinker with it to make it 'work' and they don't have the skill to do it.
Re:VPC isn't the only virtualization solution (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, Paris Hilton is not having sex for a year! Oh my, I just saw a pig fly. I'm going back inside now.
Re:VPC isn't the only virtualization solution (Score:2)
No macro's? (Score:2)
Re:No macro's? (Score:2)
Re:No macro's? (Score:2)
Re:No macro's? (Score:2)
Re:No macro's? (Score:2)
Mac users interested in OpenOffice.org need to try NeoOffice [neooffice.org]. It's a Mac native port of Open Office and the 2.0 Beta release uses Aqua. There's no need for X11 and installation is a breeze.
Competition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competition? (Score:2)
oh yea, the 90' tall behemoth is scared of the 5' tall guy with the club. (those numbers represent the rough desktop % usage).
look, I think apple is doing some awesome stuff, but dont think for a minute that MS is frightened from a couple of things apple is doing. yes, they'll copy them. and to 75% of the users in the world - when MS introduces feature X as a new feature (the one that apple has had for 4 years), all those people will be awe struck cause
MS threatened? (Score:2)
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
Removal of VB macro's (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Removal of VB macro's (Score:2)
I've actually written some macros to do some pretty elaborate things (read: connect to a mainframe via FTP, pull today's list of transactions, move it to an Excel file, sort them by various categories, and then give the totals for each category). And, no, I didn't have access to the mainframe itself, so native Unix tools were not an option. And the project had to be done approximately yesterday, look nice, and be usable b
Re:Removal of VB macro's (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the removal of VBA will pretty much kill Excel for me... VBA is Excel's killer feature - without it, there really is no compelling reason to use Excel (for me). Frankly, a spreadsheet is pretty amateurish without a scripting language, and the only reason I was using Excel was because the scripting language was cross-platform. People will grouse about having to install Open Office, but my scripts are important enough that they will anyway.
The only problem is that I don't know the Open Office scripting language, and there are few resources to help me learn it.
Brilliant! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2)
My wife loves her Mac, but it'd be great if I could get XP running on it so she's not always bugging me to print Word/Excel docs for her that OpenOffice can't handle.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as this weird love-hate relationship continues, MS is never going to be able to fully embrace them, or feel comfortable supporting them in any way that might give them an edge over Dell and other PC manufacturers.
MS's worst nightmare is Apple gaining a corner on the PC market the same way they've cornered the MP3 player market (and using their position to bully MS and others in the PC market the same way they've bullied them with the iPod and iTunes). MS wants to be the one DOING the bullying, not the one BEING bullied.
-Eric
And for you nitpicking bastards, yes I am aware that schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are completely different diseases from a clinical standpoint, but not in common usage.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Insightful)
Zune what? Huh? (Score:2)
I also think that if apple did some quality control on these open office programs, or teamed up with google/writ
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple control both the hardware and the software. MS can't bully the box manufacturers into not supporting MacOS. They don't have nearly enough sway with the people who make the components to do anything against Apple. MS can't conveniently stop supporting intel, for example.
And Apple has one major feature that MS can't possibly achieve. Not being Microsoft.
Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
Or, companies will get a virtualization package, a copy of Windows, and the Windows version of Office just like they would for any other PC. It's a pricier solution but allows more flexibility.
Cross over (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
That would be "Corona" and the other guy was talking about "Cojones".
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I try, I really try, to use my Mac laptop with files from work. 90% goes, 10% doesn't. The 10% that doesn't fly makes it useless to trust it.
I get powerpoints where metafile graphics that should work, almost do; I get Word docs where 3 out of 4 tables that our project manager embeds from MS Project are readable, the last one is not; it's hopeless.
They break it on purpose, I think. They always have, they always will.
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
Why VBA? Why not Apple Script? Heck... MS Entourage 2004 does a great job with integrating with Apple scripts.
As it was, VBA for Office 2004 had some serious problems and limitations. Cost that works fine on a PC does not work on a Mac a great deal of the times. My coworker found that by writing VBA that only has commands and functions for Excel 7 appears to be a workaround.
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
No staffer within one of my departments has ever, to my knowledge, used the scripting capabilities within MS Office. That's over ~15 years that I've been doing this, and have worked at some fairly large places.
It's really not something that's used too often. Most people type a document, write a spreadsheet with a few formulas to add a few columns,
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
Many companies don't care, since very few employees will know that the scripting ability even *exists*. Also, OpenOffice (and NeoOffice, which runs natively on Macs) supports scripting - in multiple languages including Java.
-b.
Corones? Cojones? (Score:3, Interesting)
-b.
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:5, Informative)
Office 2007/8/whatever will support scripting, but it will be done using Applescript rather than VBA.
Also VBA is being depreciated by Microsoft in the Windows versions of Office in favor of
The real reason behind this move, rather than MS being evil and "slapping" Apple, is that the VBA compiler doesn't work on Intel Macs, and as VBA is getting replaced anyway, MS made the decision to dump it completely rather than putting a huge effort into porting a part of the system that will go away in the next few years.
Its annoying to those who rely on VBA, sure. But if you want to support legacy apps, you can continue to use the legacy version of Office.
What the hell? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
RE: VB macros (Score:2)
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:2)
Timing? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Timing? (Score:2)
And all this right after the x86 days. If that isn't a conspiracy, I don't know what is.
Re:Timing? (Score:2)
-Eric
Correction (Score:4, Funny)
Or, in other words, 6+ years. I don't blame them!
Re:Correction (Score:2)
they have
VPC mips Mac
VPC intel XP
if they can't get a VPC intel mac version without starting from scratch - they are fucking idiots.. wait..
yea.. i don't blame them
Not a surprise, but remember... (Score:2)
... Microsoft acquired VirtualPC from a third party (Connectix? I can't remember.) They also have an Intel virtualization [microsoft.com] 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.
Could it be more obvious this is a slap? (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Could it be more obvious this is a slap? (Score:2)
> but it is a clumsy product in everything from installation
> to managing environments.
Has it gotten that bad? Granted I haven't used VPC in years (about 6-7) but the installation and running I had absolutly no problems at all and even had Windows running on the external monitor while Mac was running on the laptop screen. With drag+drop between the two.
Granted games sucked at that time.
Re:Could it be more obvious this is a slap? (Score:2)
No bottom lines or consumer interests were harmed by the making of those posters.
Do what now? (Score:5, Funny)
Hold the conspiracy theories... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hold the conspiracy theories... (Score:2)
And what you seem to forget is that VirtualPC for Windows does exactly what VMWare and Parallels do.
newspeak (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:newspeak (Score:3, Informative)
So, with a sensible document-format, all you need to exchange documents is any compliant software on either end.
With MS-Office, on the other hand, it's not enough that all participants have some MS-Office compliant software. It's not enough that they buy Microsoft Office, the very same office-suite. It's not even enough that they buy "MS-Office 2007", no, that's not enough to ensure compatibility.
It needs to be: "MS-Office 2007, running on MS-Windows, variant for 32bit Wind
Office compatibility is going away. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Office compatibility is going away. (Score:3, Insightful)
True. But most of those places don't use macs, nor are ever going to consider it.
Secondly, it is often speculated that Excel errors cause millions of lost revenue because of rounding problems and user error.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113/ [microsoft.com]
So yeah... Thats a feature. Not a bug. If you really want to do serious work on mission critial finacial spread sheet data entry... You need some
Re:Office compatibility is going away. (Score:2)
Mac Wars (Score:2)
Office... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Cross-Platform Compatibility? (Score:5, Funny)
Great. Now I have to spend the next 20 minutes scraping coffee and lung material off of my keyboard and monitor.
Re:Cross-Platform Compatibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother with Intel version of VPC for Mac? (Score:2)
Is VB actually important? (Score:2)
So? (Score:2)
Signing off on their death (Score:2)
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'
This is a bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's Ok... (Score:2)
Very funny that they (MS) made the announcement the same time VMWare made theirs.
This is a feature, yes? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Macro language in Office for OSX? (Score:3, Interesting)
VirtualPC = Emulation (Score:4, Informative)
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
substantial re-write? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Lies, misrepresentation, and competition (Score:2, Flamebait)
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.
OpenOffice.org to the rescue (Score:2)
Just hope OOo macros will make it into a future version of ODF.
*Yawn*. This just follows their pattern. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what other platforms are left that Virtual PC will run on? Oh... Windows. That's a surprise...
Re-Write! (Score:3, Funny)
And if there is one thing Micorsoft doesn't do, it's rewrite software from scratch.
not needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No problemo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No problemo! (Score:2)
Viruses, worms, spyware? I'd say that's a pretty consequent share of the software people run on Windows...
Re:No problemo! (Score:2)
My wife's got VirtualPC. She uses it to do one thing - to verify how a newsletter she writes looks in Outlook and how a website looks in IE. She fires it up once a month or so for maybe 20 minutes. When she fired it up a couple days ago, she found it was thoroughly pwn3d. So now I know how I'll be spending my evening tonight. Grumble.
Re:This is BS, coming from Microsoft (Score:2)
Especially considering both products have PC versions.
While they probably wouldn't be able to share the entire codebase (obvious platform differences) they could readily share the core engine of VirtualPC as well as the VB stuff.
Virtual PC going away isn't a significant loss for anyone. Parallels works quite well now and VMWare is expected soon. As well these companies have experience with virtualization, not emulation. (VirtualPC emulated a PC, x86, etc.)
Dropping VB support in Office on the Mac platform is
Re:This is BS, coming from Microsoft (Score:2)
Knowing MS is all about the bottom line, I'd have to say:
It's not as profitable to develop it themselves when you'll still buy a Windows license anyway.
Re:This is BS, coming from Microsoft (Score:2)
Re:This is BS, coming from Microsoft (Score:2)
Re:The Nail That Sticks Up... (Score:2, Funny)
This was quite possib
Re:The Nail That Sticks Up... (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:Visual Basic Macros removed? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Nice... (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft? Cross-platform compatibility? (Score:3, Informative)
It was released [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:No VB Macros in Office!?! (Score:2)