Microsoft: Are you trying to make VSTO fail?
The About Visual Basic Newsletter headlines a complete rewrite of a favorite series of articles this week:
Learn VBA Macro Coding with Word 2007 - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial
This tutorial was originally published for Word 2000, so it's about time I brought it up to date.
When I decided to update the series, 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.