No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs

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

[NormalVisual]

Fortunately, Parallels is still available for the Mac and later this year VMware will be as well. I don't think MS will be missed at this party.

Competition?

[alucinor]

Maybe Microsoft didn't like the "Hasta la vista, Vista" banners at the Mac show yesterday? Or especially "Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat." Perhaps they feel like they're being threatened?

No VB Macros in Office!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how this will play out. One the one hand, this is likely to be the first version of Office in a long time that isn't a security disaster. On the other hand, if it won't run all the existing macros, then there really isn't much reason to choose MS Office over Open Office.

Now they've got Apple by the corones..

[OlivierB]

Sure you can read and write compatible files with Ms Office. You can even run the "old" office under Rosetta with Support for VBA.
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:No problemo!

[NormalVisual]

If VMware's Mac product is as good as Workstation is on the PC, then it's almost a given that my next machine will be a Mac - at that point, there really won't be anything of consequence that I won't be able to run on it.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch
 
I'm not much of a programmer, but surely they have most of 'Virtual PC for Intel' in the x86 Windows Virtual PC version? Could they not use the underlying code from that?

Could it be more obvious this is a slap?

[Jerk City Troll]

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:Less software?

[diersing]

I wouldn't have anticipated someone saying cross-platform compability is a top priority while dumping a cross-platform compability tool for reasons of it being too hard.

Office compatibility is going away.

[ErichTheRed]

I can see why Microsoft doesn't want to support Virtual PC. Now that Apple's on Intel hardware, it's easy enough to just build a Windows partition and boot to it when you want to use stuff like PC games, Virtual PC, etc. Remember, people need to buy software to make it worth the while of a commercial software vendor!

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.

shh they werent invited

[crashelite]

they didnt originally code vpc anyways so what are they complaining about

Re:Less software?

[IAmTheDave]

The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch

This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:

1. Virtual PC runs on Windows

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 still the big dogs - for now. But Apple, OSX, Google, Firefox - MS is losing ground everywhere, and closing down their OSX division is probably just one of the areas that they're going to try to shore up a sinking ship.

Re:Brilliant!

[mrxak]

BootCamp is intended for switchers who aren't quite ready to jump into Mac OS X. It seems to be working for them too, since Apple's sales have skyrocketed lately. The fact that people are using it to play games is a side-effect, and not necessarily a bad one.

This is a bad thing?

[greysky]

Now all that Apple has to do is to get the VBA scripting in their office suite up to par, but more secure (ie: not as vulnerable to viri and other attacks), and it's just another feather in Apple's cap as to why their platform is more secure. Just imagine a year from now after the first really nasty macro virus for the new version of office is released into the wild and, lo and behold, it doesn't affect Mac users. This isn't a problem for Apple, but rather a huge opportunity.

Re:Office compatibility is going away.

[vertinox]

Despite what SAS, Oracle and everyone tells you, many key business processes boil down to VB macros in Excel spreadsheets.

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 something other than a microsoft product like Oracle, and SAP says.

However, if you are a small company and don't need something that accurate or redundant (you know like only 4 people are going to be working on the data at a time instead of thousands) then Excel is quite a good product.

But those small houses don't really need VBA unless they can't get their data into a pivot table or an Access report.

However, VBA is really useful for automated tasks such as data manipulation and repetative tasks. Which most people that I see working on Macs do not do much off since they are really small houses or doing desktop publishing.

substantial re-write?

[jafac]

Bullshit.

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.

Re:Less software?

[gb506]

The real reason they've dumped it is because anyone can buy Parallels now for 80 bucks, and vmware is getting into the ring.

Re:Less software?

[mithras the prophet]

Well, Parallels and VMWare are pulling it off, right? And you have to assume they're reusing plenty of code from their Windows and Linux products. Presumably, most of the hard work is in the actual virtualization engine, not the presentation UI.

Re:Removal of VB macro's

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Less software?

[forkazoo]

The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch

This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:

      1. Virtual PC runs on Windows

Ummm... How about:

2. Virtual PC was a Mac product before MS bought it, when they managed to port it to a new architecture and OS without any major problems. So, they probably still own all the Mac OS glue code they would need to make it work, and it's just a matter of updating in and integrating it with the existing Intel virtualisation...

Re:Cross-Platform Compatibility?

[christurkel]

You have to translate this. When they mean cross paltform, they mean between Windows and Mac, not Windows and Linux or FreebSD. And further, it'll be cross platform as long as it doesn't threaten their monopoly.

Re:Less software?

[TheRaven64]

Not quite. The original VirtualPC was an x86 emulator for MacOS. Emulating x86 is difficult, but it is not the entire puzzle. You also need to emulate things like a video card, sound card, network card, etc. Connectix created a new product which ran on Windows and (confusingly) used the VirtualPC name because it had brand recognition. The new VirtualPC was not an emulator. It ran x86 code on x86 CPUs (with, I believe, a small amount of binary re-writing for the small number of non-virtualisable x86 instructions). They incorporated a lot of the code from VirtualPC for handling peripherals, re-writing the back-ends of these to work on Windows.

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.

*Yawn*. This just follows their pattern.

[Richard Steiner]

One of the first things they did after they purchased Virtual PC from Connectix was to kill the OS/2-native version of Virtual PC. The Mac version was the next logical step.

So, what other platforms are left that Virtual PC will run on? Oh... Windows. That's a surprise...

Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones..

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want to support legacy apps, you can continue to use the legacy version of Office.

Exactly. Since Microsoft never got around to porting Software Assurance to Mac, they can't stop us from running the older versions of Office. :)

not needed

[m874t232]

Between Parallels and VMWare, there is really no need for Virtual PC. And I suspect Xen and various forms of user mode Linux are going to become available for OS X at some point, too.