I used VBScript briefly at the very start of my programming career. Then, I used it to implement IE-specific functionality in an intranet software my company developed and sold.

Having had some previous experience with the genuine Visual Basic, I was surprised by how little of that language was implemented in VBScript. It made a little more sense when I figured out that VBScript was probably intended as a glue language for COM-/ActiveX-objects.

But it was a completely unnecessary move, although Microsoft did many silly things like that back then.

You may remember that they also launched JScript side by side with VBScript. That was a JavaScript clone or, rather, an implementation of the ECMAScript standard. JScript did all of the stuff that VBScript did and was, for a brief period, a more faithful version of the standard than even Netscape's JavaScript (ironic, as Netscape was where JavaScript was born). So, from a compatibility standpoint, JScript made much more sense than VBScript. Still, it was hurt by its name (Microsoft wanted to avoid trouble from Sun over trademark issues connected to the Java part of the JavaScript name).

Anyhow, the biggest surprise in your article is that VBScript still exists. I honestly thought it had been deprecated years ago :-)