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I don't disagree with you at all, but that's what makes it even more strange that VB has become so much more popular than I expected for enterprise usage. Did Microsoft's marketing muscle pave the way, or were other tools really just too complex for what these people (business analysts, business logic developers, etc) needed?

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Let's say you are a cubicle-dwellling enterprise schulb. You have a repetitive task to perform. Do you:

1) Spend 3 weeks requesting permission to install your favorite programming tools

2) Look around your Start Menu, suck it up and code it in Excel.

(That is ignoring VB's tight integration, first mover advantage, and the fact that an entire generation of kids grew up coding MS-BASIC.)

This takes me back to my last (long term) job. I got tapped to fix a departed worker's spaghetti code, and in the process, got VERY familiar with Excel VBA, to the point that I started goofing around with my own ideas. I must have dozens of "empty" spreadsheets with nothing but code in them. What's fun is, you can drag in just about any COM library on the system to play around with.

For a spreadsheet, Excel's a not-too-bad IDE!

It's 1994, Windows for Workgroups is on your computer connected to the other machines on the LAN via a Novell Network. No WAN. Word 6, Access 1.0, Excel 1.0. VBA is all you've got.

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