Microsoft’s Corp’s Visual Basic for Applications’ licensing agents are set to start counting royalty dollars, but told Computergram they are setting off with different business strategies. Mystic River Software Inc and Summit Software Co presented their licensee recruitment and support strategies to Microsoft last week, which sources said were basically the same. But Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Mystic River says revenues from licensing VBA will supercede those from its VBA clone scripting language, SBL, and may eventually drop the language. But over in Jamesville, New York, Summit says it will still offer its BasicScript language to users who want to license VBA 5.0 but find they can’t afford it, and therefore make money on both fronts. But the best strategy belongs to Microsoft, which is banning both companies from selling Windows 95 and Windows NT versions of their VBA clone scripting languages after a certain date, so that VBA will be left with no competition and ISVs will have to shell out the big bucks or tough it. Microsoft announced last month it would finally license VBA – now that the language was more stable – and include it in Office 97 applications. The companies predicted the Unix versions of their languages will remain popular, since Microsoft hasn’t deigned to write a VBA for Unix. Mystic River says it expects to sign up two to three dozen licensees; Summit has its sites set on about 30. The two have about 100 clone scripting language licensees between them. Mystic River’s customers include Adobe Systems Inc and Micrografix while Summit sells to Symantec Corp and IBM Corp. VBA 5.0 comes out of beta at the end of the year.
