If Microsoft had simply ported Visual Basic in a compatible way to .NET history would have been very different. What's the point of the common language runtime

If Microsoft had simply ported Visual Basic in a compatible way to .NET history would have been very different. What's the point of the common language runtime when all the common languages are just reskinned C#? This was a major missed opportunity for Microsoft -- if they had brought Visual Basic proper in .NET it would have given hundreds of thousands of applications a smooth upgrade path into modern development. It also would have given the entire Office suite an upgrade path from VBA to .NET -- something they've still not managed. To this day, our office still has one critical commercial 3rd party application written in Visual Basic. It's replacement is, of course, a web app written in .NET.