Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Reader nhmacusr has provided a link to a blog which is apparently written by a member of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit who has posted an entry explaining why VB scripting will not be included in the next version of Office for Mac. It turns out there is a technical reason I wasn’t aware of. The Cliff’s Notes version is, writing VB for Mac Intel and Mac PowerPC would require a tremendous amount of work, for technical reasons, and would delay the Office product by two years, and in the end, the functionality would be equivalent to what Office provides today, which would be out of step with Windows Office. The Mac BU would rather work on making Office more Mac-like and implementing requested features than busting their hump for two years, while everyone impatiently waits, to provide something that is already outdated.

The article does say that AppleScript features will be expanded in the next version of Office, and that VB and AppleScript are very similar, and translating from one to the other is not difficult. Stay tuned.

The blog entry also says that deciding to exclude VB from Office was a painful decision that was not done hastily or without thought, and they realize it could hurt a large number of customers. There’s no active plot to kill Office for Mac, and the conspiracy crowd need not get worked up. But I can understand why they did. Considering Microsoft’s (not necessarily the Mac BU) history of questionable (to be charitable) business practices, and the fact that the lack of VB scripting will hurt Macs in the workplace (intentional or not), if only as a matter of perception, it’s easy to infer the worst. Microsoft has put themselves in the position to be hastily and sometimes unfairly judged by their past actions.