macnn
05/13/2008, 5:05pm, EDT
Tuesday, May 13th
Office 2008 triples 2004 sales, VBA to continue trend
Microsoft is selling copies of Office 2008 for Mac to the order of three times the rate of the former 2004 version, a trend which it hopes to continue once Visual Basic functionality is restored in a future version. CNET reports that while Microsoft will not share exact sales numbers, it says that they are the highest in the unit's 19-year history. Microsoft gave partial credit to Apple for the milestone, saying that increased Mac sales are "one of the components that is helping us."
Visual Basic scripting has long been embedded with Office for Mac, but was dropped from 2008 as Microsoft wanted to ensure that the suite would run properly on Intel Macs. The company has not mentioned when the next version would be available, but said that it would aim for a two to three year turnaround for major releases, versus the four it took to bring out the current version.
Filed under: software
Other story tags: Microsoft, Office 2008, Visual Basic
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wrong logic
There is no correlation between VBA and Intel processors. VBA has been running on Intel processors for what, 20 years now. They consciously chose to kill Office for Mac usefulness for businesses and focus on adding cute little templates for home users.
what next?
Virtual PC for Mac returning?I can't believe the biggest software company in world doesn't have the coders to do this in a timely fashion. They should release the next version before the next PC version.
Intel and VBA
Actually if read the blog entry last year on this issue from Microsoft's PM, you'd know that VBA on the Mac is very tied to PowerPC.
But since you seem to be intent on blaming people instead of doing homework, I'll sum it up for you. VBA is a complete scripting language implementation, which means that it needs to synthesize a virtual machine to run in. This is not uncommon for scripting languages. The runtime architecture for Darwin on x86 (i386) is very different than PPC obviously; it uses stack-based parameter passing instead of registers, different alignment of the stack, different calling conventions, etc. VBA's front end, which takes your script and turns it into bytecode, is fairly portable. But the back-end which interprets the bytecode in a VM is totally non-portable to Intel and requires significant effort to port.
Don't be naive and believe that just because it was implemented on Intel for Windows that makes it any better. Windows has a different runtime ABI than Mac OS X. It defines different calling conventions for cross-DLL function calls, different conventions for returning non-natural data types like structs, stack alignment during function calls, etc.
Basically unless you are a runtime engineer who knows the internals of ABIs (or even what an ABI is), than you should stay quiet.