VMWare under OS X. Microsoft will probably do a barely-adequate job of Virtual PC, as they usually do, and it will be late, as it usually is. VMWare could completely kick butt, particularly if Apple gave them a large financial incentive and lent them some dedicated smart MacOS-on-Intel support people.
Having VMWare-for-Mac when the first Intel-based Macs ships would help sell a zillion of them. Assume that the first Apple boxes cost about 30%-40% more than a similarly-featured Dell. Mac users would continue to buy them, but PC users who really wanted to switch but couldn't do so without a usable Windows virtual environment would probably start switching as well. VMWare is already the darling of the corporate world, and having their name associated with the Macintosh would be a huge boon.
VMWare is now owned by EMC, the same folks who own Dantz, the makers of Retrospect, the highly-respected high-end backup platform that got started on the Mac. The Apple-to-VMWare partnership isn't that much of a stretch. I just hope Apple realizes that they will need to do much more than just talk in order to get a high-quality Windows environment running under OS X, and that they realize how much they would gain from it. VMWare could help make literally hundreds of thousands of sales.
Posted by lookit at June 7, 2005 08:00 PM