From Dan Mabbutt,
Your Guide to Visual Basic.
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This article is the first page of the Chapter 13 lesson of the About Visual Basic "Complete Course" for VB.NET. Sign up for the entire course at ... this signup page

This lesson is all about how to make Microsoft's software into a TEAM !

The secret to Microsoft's success has often been rolled up into one phrase, "They own the desktop!" By that, people mean that the terrible trio of Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer are what most people use on their desktop computers. None of this happened quickly or by accident. It happened because Microsoft has followed a long term architecture for their software that emphasized integration and the ability to develop cross-platform applications.

In practice, Microsoft's successful architecture model has meant

• A version of Visual Basic (VB 6, VBScript, VBA)
• COM components
• Windows

But when Microsoft introduced .NET, everything changed. Bill Gates was quoted at the time as saying that they had "bet the company" on .NET and that's no exaggeration. If .NET had failed, Microsoft itself might have failed as well.

One of the things that changed was COM. (COM used to mean "Component Object Model", but the technology has expanded so much that a description that limiting is just inaccurate ... so it just means "COM" today.) .NET has replaced COM and it's reliance on the Registry as a central catalog of what is on your computer and how to use it.

Except ... for Office.

Office, even the latest version, Office 2003, still depends on COM. And it still uses good ol' Visual Basic 6 as the software base. (Well ... technically, VBA 6.3, but the differences aren't that great.) Microsoft was willing to "pull the rug" out from under all of the professional developers with .NET ... but not their desktop users. The problem is that Office just makes too much money and not even Microsoft could take that much risk all at once.