I was lucky enough to be at Microsoft when Visual Basic was added to Excel. I had just wrapped up working on OLE Automation—the technology used to make Excel objects programmable—and I remember that meetings with the Excel group were, at times, difficult. Why should a premier Microsoft product like Excel put so much effort into adding a low-profit item like Visual Basic when it already had a macro language?
“Because BillG said so” takes you only so far, even at Microsoft. The facts are that programmability doesn’t sell products the way some other whizbang feature might, it adds risk to delivering the product bug-free and on time, and (we found out) it poses a security hazard.
What programmability does do is make your product a platform for others. Today, Excel is the foundation for probably millions of small spreadsheet-based software solutions and is used by certainly thousands of very large and sophisticated applications. That sells products.
It also makes the skill of programming Excel extremely valuable. The community of Excel programmers is large, knowledgeable, and (I hope) well paid.
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