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Microsoft's Virtualization Stance Eying Apple?
Pisces writes "Over the past several days, Microsoft has flip-flopped on virtualization in Vista, with one ascribing the change in policy to concerns over DRM. A piece at Ars Technica raises another, more likely possibility: fear of Apple. Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price. 'All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM. The latter is absolutely crucial; telling users that they need to reboot into their Windows OS isn't nearly as sexy as, say, Coherence in Parallels. If you've never seen Coherence, it's quite amazing. You don't need to run Windows apps in a VM window of Vista. Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away. VMWare also has similar technology, dubbed Unity.' Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?"
Microsoft makes even more money if Apple puts Vista on every computer. It's an untapped market. Seems like it would be good for Microsoft.
That, and, umm, wouldn't such a move sort of alienate the Developer mindshare for OSX? I guess I don't grok the incentive to help nudge Win32/64 developers to download Xcode and go to town if they see that they can continue to use Visual Studio .NET and just hum along in building apps that compile once but run on both platforms.
Apple (or rather, the friendly folks who make Parallels) could use that as a stop-gap (a couple-years' long one) to get behind pushing WINE, CrossOver, Cedega, etc etc... if indeed that's where they're wanting to go.
I like the angle, it has appeal, but it seems more damaging in the long run than to simply work on increasing marketshare among customers to the point where Windows-only dev shops are forced to take a good hard look at coding for OSX for competitive edge and survival reasons.
Besides... if Apple really wanted to give incentives, they could/should push for building tools that make cross-compiling hella easier, with maybe an IDE that can replace VS .NET on Windows entirely, say, with a modified Xcode that --oh by the way-- has a handy and nearly automatic suite of tools to make compiling OSX apps easier for the dev who uses it.
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Initially I thought the exact them thing. But consider the consequences over time. With "hidden" virtualization Microsoft doesn't get to control the desktop. They lose one avenue to promote their brand. They don't get to push new products onto customers' desktops. They may lose control over the user's interface to the web (since Macs have a native browser). And if more people buy Macs more developers will make native applications to replace some of the virtualized ones, so over time the virtualized Windows may become almost irrelevant.
Microsoft has always been interested in control. They believe in the long run it sells the most software licenses.
Developers: We can use your help.
If anyone is terrified at virtualization, it's Apple. They are the only OS that you can't run in a VM without resorting to 3rd party hacks that may or may not work with your hardware. I had been trying to install OSX in VMware off and on for several years now, to have a place to compile mac versions of some projects I'm working on. Unfortunately I haven't had much luck. The most recent attempt was able to boot up OSX and run it very well, but unfortunately completely missing network support and other such means of communicating back to the host OS, and creating and mounting ISO images of my source tree to compile stuff on it just isn't an option. Were apple to embrace such support, VMWare and similar programs could support it natively. They won't though, because they fear exactly what this article claims MS fears. If you can run Apple software on your non Apple hardware, you have no use for Apple. Only for MS, virtualization isn't as devastating to their business, because they are a software company, and can still sell software, while Apple needs to sell you artificially proprietary hardware, and even though their software is very good, they rely on having you locked in to their hardware.
mod me funny
Apple sells hardware.
Why would they mind if people could easily run their (legacy?) Windows apps on a Mac?
If I could get my Windows apps running on a Mac for little more than the cost of the Mac alone, it'll bring me one step closer to dropping Wintel altogether; migration just got easier.
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There are a couple of major problems with this analysis:
:)
> Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price.
Microsoft, in the past and at present, has used OEM contracts as their major tool for consolidating their hold on the industry. Their OEM agreements have contained such provisions as "if you want preferred pricing, you can't sell computers that run any other operating system." Only for very, very large computer makers such as Dell and HP -- where Microsoft wants to be because there's huge volume -- do they relax these demands. The likelihood of Microsoft offering Apple an OEM contract is extremely low if MS thought it would be a threat.
Anyway, it's the business market, not the Joe Pirate market, that MS is concerned about.
> Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away.
Except for, you know, the general crappiness of the apps.
I think what MS fears is what a lot of people already know: the main thing that keeps Apple out of the business market is that there's always one or two apps you need that only run under Windows, or some web site you need to access that only works properly with IE. OSX is more reliable, easier to support, and once you've learned the tools it's somewhat easier to manage configuration over a bunch of machines than Windows. If I could use a Macbook every day and run IE and a couple of other specialty apps alongside my OSX apps, my business' next hardware purchases would be from Apple and not from HP as they have been in the past. We already have no intention of upgrading to Vista until it becomes necessary due to dropped patch support for XP. If this situation arises, Microsoft has lost their monopoly power over the PC OEM's, and the tower crumbles.
Granted, this is more true for notebooks and dekstops than for servers and other infrastructure. But if I was managing a fleet of Macs for my employees, I'd start switching things over from Windows Server to OSX Server, too.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
If so, it would be the first time they've been so concerned with support costs, which they effectively externalize to third parties and IT departments. Historically, they've always been ready to deploy products with inherent support and security complexities if that product meets their strategic needs.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, MS is an unique position in the software industry. They can make TCO arguments based, not on the supportability of their products, but on the customers' sunk costs.
That said, I think Windows running on a VM is probably stabler and less costly to support than Windows running on real hardware.
At first blush, features like Parallel's Coherence would seem to be bad for the Mac platform and good for the Windows platform. Not only is there another windows license sold, licenses of Windows based software gain at the expense of Mac based programs.
This is where DRM comes in, I think.
Microsoft understands the value of owning the platform. Virtual Windows on Macs helps them in their traditional businesses, but it undermines their desire to gain control over digital entertainment in the same way they control office automation. Control of de facto DRM standards would be yet another proverbial "license to print money".
People using Macs with cheap copies of virtualized Windows literally side by side with Mac apps is not good for this plan. They will never be a huge market, but they could be influential.
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Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?
n ap.html is officially touting DirectX 8.1 which has been experimental forever.
Yes, imho.
And it's interesting that the press release http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/fusio
A seamless "Unity for Ubuntu" and DirectX 9.0c would be the final pieces of the puzzle for a lot of folks. It doesn't help the cause for pushing development of native Linux apps. But it would certainly increase the installed base of non-Windows OSes and that's a solid baby step.
Well running a program in WINE is a far cry from running the entire Vista OS. I don't know what microsoft is so afraid of- their OS is so ungainly that unless you have 2GB of memory and don't mind your CPU running hot constantly, it's basically unusable in a VM.
Actually, WIN-OS2 was initially based on the real win3.1 source code (old agreement with MS), but the memory management was modified to be hosted by OS/2 virtual memory. The changes to the win3.1 codebase were so small, that a later version of OS/2 (red box) came without WIN-OS2 and (during the installation) recreated the entire WIN-OS2 from actual win3.1 binary code already present on the customer's hard disk.
So it was much closer to full virtualization than you think.
In any case, what really matters is not the technology. What matters is the user experience. In that regard, the similarity between the WIN-OS2 case and "Win32 on top of OSX" is striking. And old Ballmer is known to repeat good old proven strategies.
All this assumes that users - and support teams - are jumping for joy at the chance to maintain multiple operating systems, software libraries, and skill sets. To anyone but a Geek this can seem sadomasochistic.
God help them if virtualization does not remain transparent.
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Not really. It relegates Microsoft to being an API seller. Windows becomes just another cross-platform API. The only difference between using Windows or something like Qt is that your customers have to pay if you use Windows.
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I drank what? -- Socrates
WRONG. Apple is a secret society and what they are selling is actualy MIND CONTROL
disguised as cute little music players and phones.
music lover since 1969
.....Retail Home variants of Vista also aren't licensed for virtualization......
Who cares about what's licensed or not. Do you really think that 99.999% of buyers of a VISTA box will care or even look at what their box or dialog presents about agreeing to this or that? They will just install it if it will install. Unless MS can come up with a technical block that will prevent the program from working correctly in a VM, they can print the Harvard Law Library on their boxes for all the difference it would make. MS or anyone's licensing terms don't mean squat in the real world that everyone except lawyers inhabit, especially to consumers. If I were running a big business, I might pay just a tiny bit of attention to such "licenses".
All theory is gray
Yeah, it kind of is. A Mac, even with the intel processor, doesn't feel like a PC at all. I used PCs for the last 20 years and finally got around to buying a Mac (Mac Book Pro) and the overall difference is significant. No more fussing with video drivers. No more butt ugly BIOS POST screens and BIOS config screens with options that almost nobody uses. I can boot off just about anything. Can put my computer in "target firewire" mode so it can act as an external hard drive to another computer. And many other things that, while sometimes possible with PCs, just work with a Mac. And the OS is integrated with the hardware features like neither Windows nor Linux could never quite manage.
It all comes at a price of fewer choices, of course. But after 20 years of PC "choices," I'm ready to settle down on something that just works elegantly and seamlessly. Macs are just SO MUCH more pleasant to work with.
-matthew
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