Microsoft and Apple
But back to Microsoft and Apple, because—well, because technology writers are required by a little-known law to obsess about those two companies. You probably suspected it all along.
A few points about virtualization on Macs: VMware (www.vmware.com) should be vying with Parallels for attention in the Windows-on-Mac market by the time you read this. And there are those who think that Boot Camp is only a placeholder for Apple's own virtualization product—unlikely, one would think. Boot Camp, which lets you boot Windows natively on Apple hardware, is a nice complement to the virtualization solutions and absolutely the best way to run PC games on a Mac.
In the flurry of attention being given to third-party virtualization products, it shouldn't be overlooked that Apple's Rosetta technology represents another kind of virtualization. Rosetta was developed for Apple by Transitive and is based on its QuickTransit software. It lets applications written for Apple's Power PC machines run without modification on the new Intel-based machines and works by on-the-fly instruction translation. It works surprisingly well for what it has to do; or to put it another way, it's a dog, but a surprisingly frisky dog. Again, some would not call this virtualization.
Although the various virtualization solutions for running Windows applications on Macintoshes no longer include Microsoft, the company was still claiming in September that it was looking at the possibility of supplying a version of Virtual PC for Apple's Intel-based Macs. Some of us will believe it when we see it.
On the Microsoft front, Softricity was swallowed by the Beast about a year ago, and Microsoft is on record that it is pursuing virtualization in Windows at all three levels—machine, operating system, and application—and the Softricity acquisition supplies them with the third of those three levels.
Another virtualization company that Microsoft seems tight with is Xen (www.xensource.com), and Xen's Simon Crosby takes their technology swapping and cooperation to mean that Microsoft has acknowledged that his hypervisor "is the hypervisor to beat."
Gartner claims that Microsoft challenges the scenario they outlined (and that was sketched in the first paragraph of this article), but in fact Microsoft has acknowledged that operating system partitioning through OS-level virtualization is an important component that will come to market in a few years.
So didn't they agree with Gartner? At least virtually?
