Ask HN: Why won't Microsoft port MS-Access to Mac OSX?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7086230

by nuggetsgalore • 13 years ago

4 4 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

MS-Access was never part of Office for the Mac. Why?

Probably because, from Microsoft's point of view, the main reason Access exists is as a gateway drug to SQL Server. There's no SQL Server for Mac OS X (and no point in making one, since hardly anyone runs Mac servers), so no reason to port Access.

The parts of Office that were ported to Mac are different in that they're money-makers in their own right: people will happily buy Office just to get Word or Excel, but not just to get Access.

Someone• 13 years ago

Nitpick: Historically, Microsoft ported to Windows, not to the Mac. Both PowerPoint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint#History: Originally designed for the Macintosh computer) and Excel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_History: Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987.) were first released for the Macintosh. Word technically arrived for DOS first, but that version wasn't WYSIWYG.

Back to your question, my guess is that Microsoft realized that supporting Mac OS was feeding their competition more than it would bring in additional money. That didn't happen with the other applications because they were released years earlier (Access is from 1992; Word and Excel from 1985, and PowerPoint from 1987), when it was far from certain that Windows would win the desktop.

LarryMade2• 12 years ago

Some anecdotes I heard in the past was that Microsoft lost some of the source to it, either that or the source is such a huge mess it would need a virtual rewrite to get it to be portable.

Though probably the most likely one is that it was too much work to adapt the db engine to something other than the MS filesystems, as the program has existed since the early days, and the code is probably deeply rooted in MSDOS.

yuhong• 12 years ago

Well, it is probably easier now that the Access team has forked Jet 4.0 with Access 2007.

Ask HN: Why won't Microsoft port MS-Access to Mac OSX?

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