No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs 296
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. "
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple control both the hardware and the software. MS can't bully the box manufacturers into not supporting MacOS. They don't have nearly enough sway with the people who make the components to do anything against Apple. MS can't conveniently stop supporting intel, for example.
And Apple has one major feature that MS can't possibly achieve. Not being Microsoft.
Office... (Score:4, Interesting)
I guarantee you by version 4.0, Pages will be a perfect drop-in replacement for MS Word, which is what Apple probably wants. MS Office makes Microsoft a LOT of money. And Apple fanatics will be more than happy to buy an Apple office suite over MS Office.
When iWork gets as good as MS Office, it's time to port it to Windows. It won't be a nail in Microsoft's coffin, but it will surely piss them off.
Now all we need is Yellow Box for Windows finished and released and GnuStep to support most of the OS X APIs, and people can program in Cocoa and port to other environments with a simple recompile...
I'd like to see Safari for Windows. That would REALLY PISS Microsoft off.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as this weird love-hate relationship continues, MS is never going to be able to fully embrace them, or feel comfortable supporting them in any way that might give them an edge over Dell and other PC manufacturers.
MS's worst nightmare is Apple gaining a corner on the PC market the same way they've cornered the MP3 player market (and using their position to bully MS and others in the PC market the same way they've bullied them with the iPod and iTunes). MS wants to be the one DOING the bullying, not the one BEING bullied.
-Eric
And for you nitpicking bastards, yes I am aware that schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are completely different diseases from a clinical standpoint, but not in common usage.
Re:Now they've got Apple by the corones.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I try, I really try, to use my Mac laptop with files from work. 90% goes, 10% doesn't. The 10% that doesn't fly makes it useless to trust it.
I get powerpoints where metafile graphics that should work, almost do; I get Word docs where 3 out of 4 tables that our project manager embeds from MS Project are readable, the last one is not; it's hopeless.
They break it on purpose, I think. They always have, they always will.
Macro language in Office for OSX? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Less software? (Score:5, Interesting)
Corones? Cojones? (Score:3, Interesting)
-b.
Re:Less software? (Score:3, Interesting)
document compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
From the eweek article:
What? Did they need a cross-compiler or something?
The announcement basically says that since you like Apple so much, now you can use Apple's scripting technologies because "the longer-term solution and support of Apple technologies is worth the effort".
The real irony regards ODF and is too rich for words. Microsoft said we need Office XML because ODF isn't good enough. Then they founded an open-source project to sort-of support a converter. Now we see that Office isn't compatible with Office: if you run the same application on two different platforms it's own macro language won't work.
If you ask me, this is a strategy of convenience. On one hand, Microsoft wants to make Apple less convenient, to sell more Windows. On the other hand, the Microsoft really wants to sell more Office, because that's where the real money is.
One the third hand, making VBA work on OS X is doubtless harder than it looks, because there's no such thing as a clean interface at Microsoft. VBA is supposedly just a macro language; it should be written only in terms of the Office object model. But if doesn't include calls to Win32, I'll eat my hat.
That makes the equation: maintenance_cost > revenue.office - revenue.windows.