John Rizzo at eWeek has written an article, Windows on Mac OS X: Virtualization Turf War Heats Up about the potential competition that Parallels Desktop for Mac faces from VMware Fusion for Mac as well as Microsoft’s Virtual PC fading away.
Excerpt:
While Mac OS X Leopard was the focus of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference early in August, the event served as the backdrop for major moves in the platform’s virtualization market. For a moment, three vendors were standing, but as the cheers of the Mac faithful at the keynote address faded, one took a dive.
For ages the lone developer of Mac virtualization software, Microsoft unexpectedly announced that it would stop developing Virtual PC for Mac. This move coincided with VMware’s entry into the Mac market and startup Parallel Software International’s defense of its turf with an announcement of a major upgrade.
Virtualization giant VMware announced that by the end of the year, it would jump into the ring with a beta that would be able to run Windows Vista.
Parallels, a small company based in Herndon, Va., and less than a year old, announced that it would beat VMware to the punch and ship a Vista-ready, final release version of Parallels Desktop before VMware delivered its beta.
At WWDC, however VMware had the goods, previewing pre-beta VMware code running Windows Vista Beta and AutoCAD on a Mac Book Pro. The company said that the Linux and Windows versions of VMware formed the core of the Mac version.