more about our announcements

re: more about our announcements

Paul Berkowitz — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:59:25 GMT

I was led to believe that Erik (Schwieb) _is_ at WWDC - all the more impressive.

re: more about our announcements

Paul Jara — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:47:48 GMT

I got Office 2004 working again after that 11.2.6 update mishap (reboot did the trick).

The VBA fiasco is kind of disconcerting. I primarily use Office 2004 for home use, and the one Excel workbook I use the most uses VBA. You would think this sort of thing would only hurt business users.

I can appreciate the technical limitations. Whoever maintained that piece of code over the years really deserves some praise. But the reality is the primary reason I went with Office as opposed to some competing suite is "it'd just work with documents from the rest of the world". And for what I do, this is true. It appears that a lot of VBA scripters write cross-platform VBA and have extensive knowledge of the Mac VBA limitations. They simply code around these. So most documents just "work".

Now, Office is stuck on the same pedestal as OpenOffice or any of the other Office suites. I'm afraid a popular solution for many people will be to find a Mac alternative to Word, use Keynote instead of PowerPoint, Mail instead of Entourage, and then just run Excel under Parallels/VMWare.

re: more about our announcements

nadyne — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:56:23 GMT

Paul B - Hmmm, maybe I just haven't run into him this week. It's quite possible. There's a few thousand other attendees here this week!

Paul J - This isn't a decision that we have undertaken lightly. I think it's safe to say that we're not happy about being in a position where removing VBA support is the decision that we've made. But lacking infinite resources (which, in this case, involves a couple of dev-years, and those devs must have very specific in-depth knowledge), it's where we are. As Schwieb said: we were caught between the Mac rock and the Win Office hard place.

re: more about our announcements

Erik Schwiebert — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 04:38:47 GMT

No, I'm not at WWDC. My daughter is only 3 months old and there's no way I was going to make my wife take care of her and our son for a week all by herself. So, I've been doing regular work all week (except for a *wee* bit of writing and being home sick with a nasty fever today.)

re: more about our announcements

Simon Brocklehurst — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 16:44:22 GMT

I'm really not sure about all this. For sure, you guys know your business better than I do - so I'm quite prepared to accept I'm wrong. But really, to the casual outside observer, it looks like the Microsoft Mac BU is in decline. On the surface, at least, there seem to be more announcements relating to dropping products/features, than there are to announcing new products.

The pattern seems to be: Mac BU products have features cut/don't have new features added, to the point where the products start to become less relevant over time. When a product reaches the point where it's relevance in the market place is questionable, the inevitable decision to dump the product is then made.

I've written more on this in my blog entry @ http://www.psynixis.com/blog/?p=167

re: more about our announcements

ASaM bAsHiR — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 20:42:06 GMT

They may know their business Simon, but are they really in control or do they have to take orders from Vista teams? MacBU is expendable to the rest of MS, even though it has been a highly profitable and successfull. They should have been made into a seperate company many years ago...

re: more about our announcements

Schwieb — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:47:50 GMT

yep, that perception is common. i may try to blog on it one day soon. thanks for the feedback, simon.

re: more about our announcements

Priit — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:24:17 GMT

Nadyne, do you know what happened to Schwieb's blog?

http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/08/09/693499.aspx

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:37:29 GMT