What is the market share is required to provide fully featured software for
Mac users? 10%? 15%? Never?
Overall market share doesn't mean very much. There are a number of
markets for Office on Macs, all with different user profiles: Home,
small business, academic, research, enterprise, etc.
Not all Macs are even being bought to run Mac OS. A significant fraction
of Macs sold will never have Office installed on them.
Features will be evaluated based upon what each of those segments say
they need, upon how those needs fit relative to the needs of other
segments, upon the relative size of the segments, upon the technical
ease or difficulty of implementing solutions for those needs, and upon
the resources available to implement those solutions.
In the case of VBA (which took out Solver and the ATP as collateral
damage), the biggest factor was probably NOT market need. Rather, the
limiting factor was the resources available to rewrite and update the
VBA compiler, editor and run-time environment.
Even if a significant number of Mac developers had suddenly been
available (and that's not a given - MacBU typically has had fairly
substantial difficulty finding qualified coders), the magnitude of the
job made it unlikely to be completed in a reasonable time for this
release.
Remember that, while planning for Office 2008 started in 2004 (with
long-term planning beginning even earlier), Apple made the job much
bigger in June 2005, when they announced the Intel-based Macs. Not only
did that add a significant amount of unanticipated work to ensure that
Office 2004 ran in Rosetta, but also that *everything* in Office 2008
had to be moved from its CodeWarrior base to XCode in order to run
natively on the Intel chipset. That's millions of lines of code for each
of the major apps and Office core.
Obviously for those that need VBA/Solver/ATP, Office 2008 may not be
worth getting (though if one likes Office08's Word, PPT & Entourage
apps, one can certainly run XL04 along with them). But those folks -
which include me: I'm out of a job for most of my major clients - aren't
*any* worse off than they'd have been if the release of Office 2008 had
been delayed until 201x - they'd still either be using Office 2004, or
they'd find a different solution.
That would mean *no* sales, even to those that don't need VBA (a
substantial part of the market never uses XL at all), for that
additional time. For a division that is required to make a profit,
that's a bad option.
All that said, I think that, even with the market research that they do,
MacBU underestimated the users of Solver and the ATP. To reinforce that
perception, and probably help Marketing and Product Development allocate
resources, it's imperative that everyone who's unhappy that VBA was not
included submits Feedback via Help/Send Feedback...
MacOffice may weather this version without VBA - and certainly MS as a
whole would like to kill VBA, though it's fighting back mightily. But my
guess is that if it doesn't have cross-platform automation capability by
*next* version, it will permanently become a hobby suite.
Let them know that we don't want that to happen!
