Comments

> currently exposed features seem not
> enough to downsize huge success
> retrieved so far by the young
> competitor

VMware stated there are more features to come. They also have the huge advantage that they have a robust platform (SMP, 64 bit, PAE, isochronous USB 2.0 support in the guests, tools for many guest types, ...) and that all their VMs are mobile between all their products on all host OSes.

> Parallels, which has been endorsed by
> Apple itself

What are you referring to? Can you provide a pointer? It seems to be that Parallels is just another ISV for Apple, who is naturally paying to place ads and products where Apple let them to.

> is pretty fast in releasing new builds
> with new notable capabilities (like
> Coherence).

It is easy to be faster when the only host OS/guest OS combination you really support is Mac OS/Windows. VMware is completely OS-agnostic.

> could cost company serious
> difficulties in gaining back trust of
> Mac community.

There is nothing to "gain back". They just need to "gain".

I think VMware means the end of the free ride for Parallels, and that is good for customers.

Sure VMware does not have the fluffy Coherence feature, but their product just work, and work extremely reliably.

By  Pierre Lefranc, at Friday, December 29, 2006 6:24:00 AM 

Pierre,
thank you for stopping by and commenting this post.

Apple is publicly endorsing Parallels on its official website:
http://www.apple.com/getamac/windows.html
I may go wrong but this seems a little more than usual advertising an ISV can buy.


I see your points on VMware superiority (it's easy: Parallels just started) but in my experience market favor rarely is for the best product.

A lot of Apple customers already bought Parallels Desktop. More will do during 2007, simply because this product is available and VMware one not yet.

To move this customers' base on VMware Fusion (spending more money), Parallels should be really disappointing. And it's not the case readying tents of enthusiastic reviews.
Or VMware product should be free (as I ventilated in this article).

The large majority of desktop virtualization customers (and this is true on Apples Mac OS, as well as on Microsoft Windows or any flavor of Linux) doesn't care about high-end features like SMP and PAE.
They just want a fast and working solution. And when they stick with the fastest company providing one (Parallels in this case) they hardly move elsewhere. There is no need.

So VMware may come with an impressive feature set for Fusion RTM, but the lost one whole year.
And for that time Parallels is supposed to release a server product for Mac OS X Server, which will complicate things even more, if VMware will not do the same with Server.

Be in late may give competitors that margin to become leaders. Exactly what VMware did to Microsoft.

By  alessandro, at Friday, December 29, 2006 1:10:00 PM 

Actually Macintosh community follows the path of Apple philosophy : have a need-have a solution, easy to use, no competitors, no complains.

Regarding virtualization all the people actually using Parallels (which has all the fancy features of VMWare, such supporting every OS, a good filesharing system between host and guest, a good integration with system GUI, etc.), first arrived on the market, will not have a simple switch to another system which claims features that are not appealing to other than system integrators or system engineers.

Most of Parallels users simply need to run another OS to retain backward compatibilty with an older way of working (usually caused by they co-workers).

Things probably will be different for a server side product.

By  Massimo Ferrari, at Friday, December 29, 2006 1:56:00 PM 

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