Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

There is plenty to say about yesterday’s keynote, and I’ll be saying most of what I think on tomorrow’s edition of Your Mac Life. However, today I wanted to make some points about Microsoft’s recent announcements.

Virtual PC for Mac is going away, and the next version of Office will be reduced in functionality. I understand why Virtual PC is being discontinued: Boot Camp, Parallels, and now VMware offer excellent ways to run Windows on a Mac, and Microsoft is going to be late to the game. It’s a money loser for them, and they’re not interested. That’s fine. But I also think some part of it is competition. It seems that as soon as Microsoft encounters competing products on the Mac platform, they withdraw. Consider the following:

Internet Explorer used to be the default browser for the Mac. When competition in the form of Safari showed up, Microsoft dumped IE faster than a ton of bricks.

Windows Media Player for Mac had always been a pile. When a third party created a halfway decent QuickTime plugin to play Windows Media files, Microsoft announced that WMP for Mac would no longer be developed because they never liked doing it anyway.

Virtual PC used to be the only way to run Windows on a PowerPC Mac. When Apple put Intel chips inside their machines, Parallels and VMware came along to offer competing ways to run Windows on top of Mac OS. Microsoft declared Virtual PC for Mac too hard to do, and killed the project. (It doesn’t seem too hard for Parallels and VMware…)

Considering the points stated here and the line that runs through them, what do you think will happen to Office as Apple’s iWork suite matures? Is the lack of VB scripting in the next Office version an indication that Office for Mac is fading out, or is it a plot to prevent adoption of Office and the Macs it runs on in the workplace? I dunno. At this point, removing VB scripting seems very much like Microsoft pouting and taking their ball home. Is there a technical reason I’m not aware of?