The Office 2013 Developers’ Model: Fourth Time’s the Charm?

For the first two decades of the 21st century, Microsoft relied upon its ability to leverage its strengths in one platform to drive revenue for another. It’s a practice many thought was, or should have been, illegal, but no one ever comprehended the intricacies and subtleties of the strategy well enough to identify the point at which the practice stopped being practical and started being evil. By 2012, however, it was becoming obvious that the leverage principle could not drive Microsoft’s marketing strategy forever. In this examination of the company’s change of course for Microsoft Office — specifically, moving from a Visual Basic-based automation scheme relying upon a separate interpreter, to a JavaScript scheme rooted in the browser — its seam was showing. In this article for Smartbear Software, I pointed this out.

“In most businesses’ perception, Office has never been an adaptable, extensible platform. Over a quarter-century after my invention of the concept and Al Gore’s subsequent creation of the Internet, businesses today are often surprised by the revelation that Office apps are open to adaptation, either by the embedded Visual Basic for Applications interpreter (VBA, the second generation of the Office platform) or by so-called line-of-business apps written for the .NET Framework runtime (LOB, the third generation)... With Microsoft, I have often said the third time’s the charm. But this is try #4: a new and even more daring effort to present Office as a development platform in the same league as the Web.”