Re: The Cost of the Intel Transition

On Aug 9, 2006, zara wrote:

"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:12dkm75fe3ck96e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
No doubt you will have heard that the next version of Office for the Mac
will drop compatibility with Visual Basic for Applications.

Here's an interesting blog post that explains why they're doing it.

[http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/]

The short answer is that it's really difficult to bring VBA to Intel on
the Mac. It's a compiler that targets PPC and not one that's easily
reprogrammed to a new target, nor even brought over to XCode very quickly.

This really highlights the costs of architecture transition; Microsoft
has chosen not to delay Office: Mac's universal version, so Mac users
lose a feature which is, for some, quite important.

Office is taking a long time to port anyway, which is no suprise. It's a
tremendous codebase, with a lot of very old code, and they have to port
it to a new compiler and toolchain first before they hit that checkbox.
It's not a great shock that MS might drop some of the most difficult bits
to get something out the door.

But it's a fair bet that once MS has weather the storm from dropping this
feature, they won't put it back. Apple might transition again, and they'd
be in the same place.

Yeah - and who even gives a shit about a market with a 4% max cap?


Have not seen figures since, but 2000 - 2002 Mac Office was bringing in over
$8 billion and was more profitable than Windows Office. So if today's numbers
are even close, yeah, I think someone gives a shit about its outcome.

.

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