There's an old but (+5, interesting)
post over at the blog of a
Mac Office developer. Said post summarizes the rationale behind removing Visual Basic support in Mac Office 12, and it does so with a convincing argument that the decision was technical, not political. It's pretty depressing, actually, how obvious the choice seems given Mr. Schweibert's explanation, to the point where it seems to me like a case study in what bad things can happen when your code ties too closely to your hardware.
But, then again, who knew ten years ago that Visual Basic would need to run on a then-nonexistent Mac OS? For that matter, would VB have become successful in the first place had the original Win32 compiler been portable but slow? Tough calls all around on this one.
Once again, Audi
breaks new ground without actually doing so. That thing is
beautiful.
