Don't they already have that? I can't make myself into a novice again, so I can't be certain, but VB.NET sure seems as easy as VB6. The only thing that it is really lacking is that I would expect that a lot of VB6 programmers started with VBA, and no longer have that route. For my part, I think I would have picked up .NET faster than VB6, because I learned C++ early on, and really liked the OO model. I was always trying to get VB6 to appear more OO, though you could only go so far with that, since the language didn't allow much.

What I think will bring in novices the quickest is gratification. The ability to create a Hello World application rapidly is a real plus. That's not so easy to do with C/C++, but is equally easy to do in VB6 and VB.NET (and C#, for that matter). The problem is that it may be even easier to do in HTML. The point is that there are sufficiently simple tools to draw in novices, but MS no longer dominates 90% of computing devices out there and that has nothing to do with the presence or absence of any particular language or suite of languages. There is no threat to Windows on the desktop. There is no success for Windows off the desktop. No language is changing that.