Microsoft: No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs
I just caught this on eWeek: “Microsoft: No Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs”, by Peter Galli—August 7, 2006
“Microsoft has decided not to move forward with a version of Virtual PC for the Intel-based Macintosh, and will also be discontinuing support of Visual Basic scripting in the next version of Office for Mac, the company said.
“As Virtual PC for Mac was originally developed on the PowerPC platform, the amount of time that it would take to bring it to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch, Scott Erickson, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, told eWEEK Aug. 7…”
Well – that was to be expected. Running Windows application on an Intel Mac is a totally different ballgame than a PowerPC.
However, the ” sorry, we’re not doing this on intel” line has been a rather repetitious issuance from Micrisoft MacBU lately – see the MS Office VBA article in here as well.
For all its claims of supporting the Mac platform, there seems to be some definite pullback trend at Microsoft. Increasingly, Microsoft seems simply unwilling to allocate the resources necessary to port large chuncks of their software to the Intel platform – which in itself is rather ironic, all things considered!
I doubt we would have heard such comments as “ohh, it’s just too hard!” would Connectix still own Virtual PC, for instance…
I wonder what will be next.