VBA for Mac goes away
I came across this post about Microsoft stopping Visual Basic support in Office for Mac (via df). Joel gives a pretty interesting history of VBA support on macintosh and suggests that a fundamental goal of it was building a lock-in to their system. Because the process of building their VBA enivornment was so monumental a task, no one would be able to replicate it so all the effort that customers put into building VBA scripts in office would lock them into it. Pretty sneaky sis.
He gives this bit o’ analysis on the topic:
But what’s really interesting about this story is how Microsoft has managed to hoist itself by its own petard. By locking in users and then not supporting their own lock-in features, they’re effectively making it very hard for many Mac Office 2004 users to upgrade to Office 2008, forcing a lot of their customers to reevaluate which desktop applications to use.
I think to some degree this is an interesting observation. However, I think that might be coming from a not-grandiose-enough viewpoint. That is, it presumes that Microsoft’s primary worry should come from Mac people upgrading their Office apps. I wonder if it could be that this is a defensive move (as Scott says, defensive moves almost never work out) to help save their operating system monopoly by making it harder to switch from XP/Vista to Mac?
With the rising presence of OS X and Apple’s computer business growing at 3x the rate of the industry, at least some of that growth has to be coming from Microsoft switchers and people who in the years of old might have purchased their first windows computer. The two things that I’d guess almost everyone uses are a browser and office apps. The browser we already know is no lock-in, but office apps still are. Since they’re pretty cross platform at this point there’s very little holding back the average person from moving to a mac. But if office loses this bit of cross platformosity - maybe that makes people think twice about it.
I think it’s a losing strategy since it’s possible in any event to run parallels or bootcamp and have both. Still, to do that you’ll need to buy the OS from Microsoft. Ultimately, though, I think it will open up the field for other office apps (i.e. docs.google.com) and will do little to stem the tide of Microsoft switchers. Microsoft really needs to focus on building better software to do that.
