Well of COURSE they are out of favour. They aren't new products. The "powers that be" want you to buy their newest, latest, greatest (?) stuff. Don't you realise that, Uncle G?
>>>The "powers that be" want you to buy their newest, latest, greatest (?) stuff<<<
I sometimes wonder why things cost so much. And then I do what appears to be a simple bit of programming and it ends up taking me 4 hours to do something that anyone looking at would say well that must have only taken you 5 minutes to do that.
Really Microsoft has been remarkable in the way it has continued it's products in the same vein, making incremental improvements, keeping their customers on board, not pissing them off too much! But it look like they were running into a big problem, they needed to step up from the PC to the internet, I thought that they would struggle. I think they did in the beginning, and I was convinced that Google was going to come out on top.
Lately I have been using Microsoft online stuff, Dynamics 365, and although I find it a bit lacking, a bit amateurish, a bit of a cobbled together look and feel to it, a bit like some of the early Microsoft products, I am actually quite impressed with it.
Talking about Google, they don't have a clue how to look after their customers. Somebody pointed out to me recently that Googles business model is it's free, so tough. If you don't like it, they don't care. They don't listen to their customers, because they don't see that they have customers. Where as Microsoft probably don't listen to their customers that much, but at least they treat them as customers to a degree.
I'm going away from Google now, too much, lately, has just been shite, basically Google is a brilliant, lovely product, but then you just get the little tiny niggly thing wrong, and that just spoils it for me. I mean even if I could ask google, and you can't, but if I could ask, and they said "No" we're not going to be doing that for a few years, that would be something! But they are just not customer orientated.
What I got from your comment Richard was Microsoft want to sell us the latest and greatest, they want to make money so they can invested in making the next iteration. I didn't think Microsoft would get to the next iteration the web, not before Google, but they have and it's good. It also looks like Another iteration they want to impose is to shift their developers from VB over to C Sharp, I don't think this is a big problem for VB/VBA developers especially as I think I saw somewhere a converter for converting VB into C Sharp. And from what I see, it's mostly a change in syntax. Stick in a few curly brackets and you're a C Sharp Programmer!