Microsoft: Are you trying to make VSTO fail?
When I recently decided to update one of my articles about VBA programming, one of the things I did was check up on VSTO again. VSTO, if you don't recognize the acronym, is Visual Studio Tools for Office.
VBA is the very last remnant of COM programming (that is, VB6 level technology) in Microsoft's entire development suite of tools. If you open up Word 2007 and fire up the Visual Basic editor, those of you who loved good old VB6 will feel the love again. VSTO is Microsoft's chosen strategy for finally getting rid of it and replacing it with a .NET based technology.
The problem is that this is probably the most screwed up marketing decision Microsoft has ever made. (I disagreed with the original decision to jettison VB6 mainly on ethical grounds. It was just wrong to pull the rug out from under (formerly?) loyal VB6'ers who have poured billions into VB6 development over the years. But on a strictly business basis, I could see why they did it.)
The main problem with VSTO is that it's priced and packaged to guarantee that there is really no market for it. Let's review what VSTO is. It's Visual Studio Tools for Office (emphasis mine). That means that many of the people who are most likely to be interested in it are the Office mavens. The Word Wonders. The Spreadsheet Superheros. But to use VSTO, you need a copy of Visual Studio .NET 2008 Professional. You can't even buy the standard version. VSTO isn't in it. And you need to learn .NET programming.
In effect, you're telling the natural market for VSTO that in order to use it, they have to basically join the programming staff in the I/T department.
The people who will already be equipped to use VSTO, that is, the programming staff in the I/T department, are far more likely to simply say, "Why not just code up this sucker in regular VB.NET? We can use any of the Office libraries we need anyway. Why complicate things with VSTO?"
At this point, I'm going to recommend an old book review I did a few years ago ("Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" - It really is a great book.) about how nearly all (that is, everybody but Microsoft) of the software companies from the great age of PC software shot themselves in the foot and disappeared from the face of the earth.
Don't tell me that the MBA's at Microsoft are smarter than that and they know what they're doing.
Comments
This IS scary and this does NOT make any sense. It will be interesting to see what happens and what possible takes VSTO’s place – because it IS dead on arrival.
Don’t hold your breath.
This is actually at least the third packaging attempt for VSTO. I became aware of VSTO back when it was an “add on” for the old COM based Visual Studio. They claimed that it was worth $400 retail back then, but they were giving it away free at lots of seminars. I eventually accumulated a whole stack of them.
I wish I knew what was going on inside Microsoft. (Actually … a lot of people wish they knew what was going on inside Microsoft. Guessing about it is a whole industry these days.) It would be great to be a “fly on the wall” listening to the MBA’s argue about this in one of their internal meetings.
I just came across your article and could not agree more. I purchased Visual Studio Professional a few months ago in order to build my own web site and to use VSTO and the Access Runtime–Guess what. The Access Runtime was included in VS 2005 but it is NOT in VS 2008. You have to buy a MSDN subscription–about a thousand bucks. This was NOT made clear in the official documentation where they sell VS. When I complained about this in a comment on a Microsoft Blog they blocked me from logging on to the blog. I was not being ugly or disrespectrul in any way. Office is Microsoft’s greatest asset. If Office goes down the drain, why buy Windows?
I love Visual Studio and Office, but I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot.
Thanks for your vote of agreement. My guess would be that the VSTO developers are even more frustrated than we are. There’s nothing worse than having great ideas and the talent to make them happen … and then being trapped in a bottle by stupid management.
(Microsoft developers continue to have my greatest respect! But things have just gone downhill since Ballmer took over.)
You’ve gotta read my review “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!“
I am a VBA/VSTO developer (ex-accountant). I agree with a lot of what you have all said, but VSTO has provided a smooth platform for VBA developers to move neatly into the Visual Studio Environment. However, the deployment of a VSTO project is ridiculously over-complicated (as is the documentation). Microsoft really went out of their way to make it a hard as possible to get the deployment right
I never said it wasn’t smooth. I said it was expensive, unnecessary, and forced the people most likely to use the system to adopt a new and foreign way of doing things (Visual Studio).
But thanks for the vote of agreement!