Microsoft plans to take a giant leap into the server consolidation space this week by announcing the acquisition of virtual server software company Connectix. The software giant, which is expected to formally unveil the deal Thursday, will use the technology to allow customers to carve out multiple partitions on a single Intel-based server, allowing them to run multiple instances of a single operating system and multiple workloads. Update: Read more for info on the fate of the MacOSX version.“They see a market in server consolidation and they want a piece of it,” said one source familiar with the deal. Connectix also makes Virtual PC for Windows, Virtual PC for Mac and Virtual PC for OS/2, which allows customers to run multiple operating systems on a PC. The technology will be integrated into the Windows code, sources said.
We don’t know the fate of Virtual PC for Mac which allows Mac users to run Windows on their Macs. Virtual PC is strategically an important application for Apple as it allows users to run applications that are tied to Windows that could potentially be important for these users.
Please note that VMWare can not run on any architecture other than x86 while the Bochs emulator is extremely slow when compared to Virtual PC and is neither as flexible, easy to use or as good/compliant with x86 and its peripheral hardware. Bochs is getting better by the day, but it is nowhere near the capabilities and the user experience Virtual PC offers today. If Microsoft decides to not continue supporting the Mac platform, Apple could be facing a big blow, as Virtual PC is among the most important apps in the Mac land and a “bridge” between the two platforms.
Update: A Microsoft executive said the company did not purchase the software to kill it, nor does Microsoft plan to stop developing its native Macintosh software, such as the Mac OS X version of Office.
“Mac OS X applications (are the) best solution for heavy access to applications (like Office),” said Tim McDonough, director of marketing for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit. “Virtual PC just takes that to the next level–you can now be compatible with applications that only run on the PC.“. OSNews surely hopes that Microsoft will continue to support OS/2 and MacOSX after the purchase of the Connectix assets.
Think M$ will continue to update it?
There are 2 things that can kill apple and they are not the lack of Office for the Mac. IMHO are this:
– Microsoft buying Connectix
– Microsoft buying Macromedia
I mean, it’s not like the absence of VPC will cause Mac diehards to switch to PC anyway, so supporting VPC on Macs at least guarantees MS that some Mac users will continue to run Windows on their Mac. Probably not the best of situations for MS, but still better than the alternative.
I will have to add two more:
– MS buying Adobe
– MS stopping Office, VPN and Media Player and in general, all their “bridge” software that makes switches feel “confortable” with their switch.
YEA! Play PS1 games on XP or XBOX
Why do they want to emulate a cpu instead of running a virtual machine session? From what I’ve heard, VMWare is alot faster than VirtualPC, but I don’t know what “server consolidation” is… maybe it requires emulation?
So we can run Gnumeric, Gimp, and others.
I think Apple can hang in there…
-Jason
Anonymous, please read the article before you post this message. VMWare only runs on x86 because it USES the x86 CPU to do its stuff, it “runtimes” and “passes through” requests and it emulates very little. In other words, VMWare as it is today, can’t run on anything else than x86 and this “limitation” is what makes it faster than VPC.
I posted an article explaining the difference of all 3 products a few months ago:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1054
Also, VMWare is a _very_ expensive company to buy today, and Apple is not in its best shape to invest on something like that. They are much better to invest their time on Bochs and fix it, instead of buying VMWare and re-engineer whole portions.
J. Todd Slack, what about X11? What that has to do with Windows? People need VPC to run _specific_ Windows apps, very specific. X11 has nothing to do with what VPC offers.
>>J. Todd Slack, what about X11? What that has to do with >>Windows? People need VPC to run _specific_ Windows apps, >>very specific. X11 has nothing to do with what VPC offers.
I should have specified better..
I meant that if M$ pulls Office, etc There are alternatives. Maybe not exactly equal, but there are alternatives none the less.
-Jason
I use VMWare and it is really, realy fast.
I use VPC on my mac G4 with 2 gig of RAM and it is really, really slow.
-Jason
Yes, they are alternatives, but people want to use mostkly what they know better.
And more over, the market of VPC is not to run Office and user-oriented apps, there is already Office for Mac.
The market of VPC is to run chemistry, weird apps, math apps, special proprierty scientific software etc on your Mac. So, when a scientist is in the jungle and he only got his mac with him, to be able to run that “weird” scientific app he needs that only runs on Windows. That’s how VPC makes money. Specialized stuff, please don’t think in terms of “office, MS media player, and IE”. That’s not what VPC tries to sell to.
Why not VMWare?
Inferior, and a long way to go to reach VirtualPC on MacOSX, (however an option in Linux but that’s not what we are talking about)
Why not Apple’x X11?
Because there’s a better way to run Gnumeric it’s called Linux and runs on cheap X86 processors.
Actually apple should have bought Connectix long time ago and include VirtualPC by default on their OS’s, just my two cents.
@Eugenia, I feel a difference between Adobe and Macromedia that’s why I not listed Adobe on the fears. MS may consider buying Macromedia but slowly killing Adobe. This is a stand alone discussion anyway.
Oh, I agree totally.
My point was that Apple, I think, will be able to adapt and survive, like they always have, if M$ were to pull Office, buy Adobe, etc.
They are surviving without Quark. If Quark desn;t come through with a carbonized version of XPress (as the CEO has repeatedly said that Macs suck) then I think that Apple will be fine.
-Jason
>@Eugenia, I feel a difference between Adobe and Macromedia >that’s why I not listed Adobe on the fears. MS may ?>consider buying Macromedia but slowly killing Adobe. This >
>is a stand alone discussion anyway.
If M$ were to buy Macromedia then Adobe would have to turn out new products quickly to maintain. Once M$ has Macromedia then Adobe’s market share is at risk and quickly.
-Jason
Ernesto, VMWare is **NOT** inferior to VPC. It is just different. VMWare virtualizes and runtimes, while VPC for Mac is an emulator. These are two different beasts, even if the outcome looks the same for the user. Please read the article I linked above, where I explain the differences. No matter what, VMWare is not inferior to VPC, just different architecturally.
Adobe Photoshop is more important than Macromedia’s solutions, simply because people still have the illusion that Photoshop runs faster on PowerMacs, so marketing-wise, Photoshop would be a bigger blow to Apple if MS was to purchase Adobe.
this is the first step for MS into the big time server market…..sure, right now Intel cannot scale like Sparc or Power4/5 but it will one day and this is what MS is setting up for becasue what is a 64 CPU server with 2 TB of memory if you can not partition it? IMHO MS will have to make something very diffrent than windows to run on those suckers…to much fluff.
>>Why not Apple’x X11?
>Because there’s a better way to run Gnumeric it’s called >Linux and runs on cheap X86 processors.
If you have OS X though then why would you buy/use a PC for Gnumeric and other x11 apps if you can use your Mac?
> Photoshop would be a bigger blow to Apple if MS was to
>purchase Adobe.
Agreed, but Adobe would never sell to M$ (Ar I think that they wouldn’t)
Back in the days of early PostScript M$ tried to burn Adobe to many times and I think there is still a grudge hanging around <grin>.
-Jason
Today I saw a screenshot of Quark for OS X so it is comming.
“The market of VPC is to run chemistry, weird apps, math apps, special proprierty scientific software etc”
Completely disagree, the market of VPC is to make switching easy for newbies as the possibility of running VPC is the second topic a seller would tell you while buying a Mac (at least in Spain). You won’t find people running weird apps with VPC but the apps they are use too and still have not found replacement (doesn’t matter if it exists); for example eMule !
VMWare is dog slow, I think MS buying Connectix will be a good thing. Will they continue to update VPC for Mac ? I hope not. Apple has screwed MS a couple of times this year and I hope MS sticks it right back to them.
>Today I saw a screenshot of Quark for OS X so it is >comming.
Do you have a link, I would like to see.
I hope they get something right back at them
> You won’t find people running weird apps with VPC
But i have. The people who want to run eMule on VPC, are the people who WAREZ VPC, not buying it. 90% of the people who want to run IE 6 or eMule, don’t buy, they warez.
VPC is living off the professionals who need to be able to run their scientific proprierty apps on their Mac laptops…
@Eugenia; you are right just replace inferior with inexistent and we will get an agreement. Sometimes my English sucks.
@Todd;
“If you have OS X though then why would you buy/use a PC for Gnumeric and other x11 apps if you can use your Mac?”
I’m talking about switchers. Isn’t apple promoting the capability of running VPC on their switch campaign. Talking of surviving with opensource alternatives on the mac it’s a nonsense topic cos you can run them on cheaper processors on an opensource os. Why switch then?
J. Todd Slack quit producing fud. There is not even a beta for Quark for X I am an official beta tester for the company and version 6 is not even a Mac OS X product. Try again. If you saw a screenshot of something it was pretty much faked.
Quark screenshot
http://www.faq-mac.com/mt/
@Eugenia;
VPC is living off the professionals who need to be able to run their scientific proprierty apps on their Mac laptops…
I agree somehow, this are the apps that may go to X11 soon.
>J. Todd Slack quit producing fud. There is not even a beta >for Quark for X I am an official beta tester for the >company and version 6 is not even a Mac OS X product. Try >again. If you saw a screenshot of something it was pretty
?>much faked.
Read carefully, I did not say I saw a screenshot, I said that I didn’t think Quark would come through!
See Ernesto’s post and this link:
http://www.faq-mac.com/mt/
I’ll accept an apology, although I don’t expect one.
-Jason
>I agree somehow, this are the apps that may go to X11 soon.
If they were to go X11, they would have gone Mac already and no one would need to purchase VPC. Nope, the kind of apps we are talking about are “old”, proprierty scientific software, specialized software that doesn’t see many updates from its creators.
It’s from the Quark website. What company are you a beta tester?
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/images/xp6/series1_details.jpg
I was hoping apple would buy connetix and tweak it into the os so you could run windows app’s just like classic apps. I think that would make the mac the place to be if you wanted interoperability.
Two formerly “Mac-only” software companies gobbled up by “The Big Man”. Where will it end? Eh, who cares…
I say Apple should declare an all-out war on Microsoft for these intrusions to it’s software base!
Of course, another way to look at it is…
They were weak and ineffective at doing what they once did, so they capitulate as “Devil’s Advocate” in order to survive…
To me, falling in with Microsoft is worse than going bankrupt!
“Tis better to have lived and died on your own than to go on existing under someone else’s control…”
Of course, the almighty dollar rules, so he who can give it, get’s what they want… and many people follow in his footsteps like lemmings to a cliff.
There’s a bible scripture somewhere about this kinda scenario… something about narrow and wide paths?
*sigh*
Luposian
Virtual monopoly but not really.
VPC for Windows outsells VPC for the Mac. Most VPC users are using it to run older incompatible Windows apps on Windows, not Windows apps on Macs.
And I don’t get the dismissal of VMWare–besides them being pricier. The need MS has is for virtualization on x86, they don’t need a PPC emulator… so VMWare remains the better server virtualization product.
It’s hilarious how the dumb Mac-heads hoot and holler when Microsoft buys a multi-platform company when Apple has been doing the same damn thing — and dissing Windows — for the past two years. Using their “buy / remix / burn” strategy, Apple has terminated quite a few cool Windows apps in the recent past.
So I would guess Virtual PC will be discontinued for the Mac. It is simple street justice. And I would expect Microsoft to do more of the same in the near future.
–ms
sooo MS want to be like ibm.. look you can run multiple os on this one machine! just like ibm and its partitioning! isnt it cooool?
its anohter attept to get their leg over the big iron wall.
“The technology will be integrated into the Windows code”
Maybe also in consumer Windows? VPC + MS DOS is a nice combination for old DOS games.
I hope MS considers this.
Too bad MS didn’t buy Connectix a few years ago…. the world may didn’t have to suffer from WinME….
BTW: VMware IS an option fpo Macs! Yeah, I know that VMware does not have CPU emulation, but it could use the emulation core of Bochs. Remember, Bochs is under LGPL, not GPL.
Lord have mercy! This is quite a bombshell. Apple may have to stop its Switch campaign so Microsoft will continue to develop VPC (or something like that).
…I was considering another motivation. MS is saying they are targeting virtualization to aid migratign NT4 users to WinServer 2003… But haven’t most NT-only apps been ported or supplanted by alternatives…
Maybe the real need here is for MS to bridge Longhorn with XP… Maybe they have broken compatibility more than anyone expects so they will need to virtualize NT/XP in Longhorn.
If such a need exists (it would explain why they are building it into the OS–if it was intended for server virtualization, you wouldn’t nee or want to build it into the OS), maybe MS is going to have a bigger compatibility issue in the next few years than Apple is.
Just a thought.
Microsoft doesn’t stand to gain much from discontinuing VPC for Mac. In fact, given that it allows them to sell Windows to Mac users, they probably love it. What I bet they *will* do is discontinue the version of VPC that doesn’t include Windows, under the guise of reducing piracy. Double win for MS, because they get an OS sale with every VPC sale, and they manage to increase the cost of switching to Mac for users who need VPC.
I think a lot of these comments are misguided… as the title says, MS is buying Connectix to enter the server consolidation market. Which probably meant it has more interest in Connectix’s VirtualServer product, and not the VirtualPC (for any platform). MS may or may not be actually interested in crippling Macs.
And for server consolidation, the only products worthy of comparison are VMware’s GSX and ESX servers. There is no reason why server consolidation should be done with Macs, PCs are a whole lot cheaper.
It can’t be a coincidence that VPC is the tool of choice for many people trying Linux.
Also I guess this means MS can get you to buy a Windows license for *every instance* of an OS that you run on a machine.
That most open source software runs natively on Windows, OSX and Linux / *nix. Its only that odd proprietary commercial stuff that requires that odd proprietary commercial emulation software to keep it from vanishing into the ether forever.
When will you capitalists ever learn?
Multiple blue screens on one PC
Virtual PC is for OS/2, Windows, and Mac OS. The OS/2 and Windows versions are just like VMware. They dependo n the CPU of the host system, only emulating certain pieces of hardware while instructions run directly on the CPU.
Virtual PC for Mac is a full-fledged emulator like Bochs, but with highly optomized code (optomized for the PowerPC CPU and Mac OS.)
I prefer Virtual PC in Windows over VMware because it’s easier to use and emulates a real video card (S3 Trio32/64) with DirectDraw support. VMware emulates a VGA card (higher resolutions require a special VMware-only driver. Virtual PC, however, lacks USB and SCSI support. I also find Virtual PC to be more snappy/responsive than VMware, but actual performance slightly lower.
You don’t need a virtual PC to create a compatibility layer. (especially if you have the sources for all windows and dos versions) So I don’t think they will use this to run DOS games or older NT apps. That would be stupid. They really want to run these different Windows Server on one big machine. And this makes sense.
Apple has bought at least 2 companies in the past couple years and terminated the Windows versions. Time for Microsoft to get even.
As far as I’m concerned Microsoft can drop all products for Apple, let them die a little faster.
they need to make porting software to mac a trivial step for windows developers. Wether it is beefing up their currect(freely distributed(with osX) software development kit) or making a windows IDE that allows for multiplatform development.
Whatever it is, Apple needs to make companies that produce that crucial Windows software to make them also produce Mac software. One way or another (even bulk mailing SDKs to software companies and offer cheap(!) deals for porting their software) Apple has to make it easy to port software to the mac and make it look appealing.
And probably also to either kill the mac version or “tune it” like the mac version of internet exploder.
– Mark
“As far as I’m concerned Microsoft can drop all products for Apple, let them die a little faster.”
Either your threatenend by Apple being sucessful or your not smart enough to make a decison when choices are available to you. Bet you also want 1 car company, 1 bank, 1 grocery store, etc. so that you don’t strain yourself when you have to buy a new car or food or whatever…
Were all better off when we have more than one choice when it comes to purchasing items, no matter what they are.
– Mark
It was a silly and far-fetched theory, but I wouldn’t dismiss it offhand. Considering the majority of VPC users use it for exactly this, I don’t know why you don’t think it is a necessary tool to maintain certain compatibilities.
First, it seems that the purchase of VPC was secondary to the other things MS was after. So it’s hard to say MS bought VPC to cripple the mac.
Second, I don’t think Bill Gates wants to cripple the mac. Simply because I think he admires Apple. The man has more money and market share than God and I don’t think he would kill the mac for more.
Third, killling off Office, VPC, etc. for the mac would just create antitrust problems. Even if Apple didn’t sue, others in other lawsuits could point to what MS did to Apple as proof of their anticompetitive conduct.
Let’s imagine a little scenario. MS cuts Office and VPC, saying it doesn’t make them any money. OK, that’s probably false so they have to think about how they are going to prove that one in court. In addition, Apple could offer to buy VPC in that instance, or take on the cost of continued development of Office for the mac (and of course the profits). Can MS say no? Again, not without antitrust problems.
Fourth, Apple could creat a VPC equivalent if it wanted to. All it is an emulator and some interface code. Apple could make a better interface. And it has experience with emulators, remember the 68K one for the powerPC?
Apple has set itself on a course of challenging MS. It ain’t gonna stop. MS will probably reluctantly tolerate it.
Apple’s head office should kiss its ass goodbye. I have been pounding my fist over VPC for years, suggesting that it’s aquisition would have been a powerful card to hold onto if M$oft ever decided to dump the Mac version of Office.
With VPC, Apple could have easily have turned around and said thats Ok, our customers wil just by the PC version & run it via VPC. In the meantime, they could have aided & abeted the move to Linux based Open Office.
But now that is all gone by the wayside. For the want of saving a few measly bucks Apple is now going to find itself squeezed even more. And for all the talk about M$oft continuing support….yeah something akin to having someone keep a foot on your head while they teach you to breathe underwater.
Apple you Dumb F..ckers. I can see my Pc Mates laughing with glee.
OK, if MS buys those, then Apple will just make equivalent apps. They don’t because Adobe and Macromedia are mostly compliant. And they have other things they are working on (Word and Excel replacements).
The Apple apps would have open file formats – just like Keynote – and probably be better. Maybe they would even use open source code like the Gimp.
I love that guy that wants apple to die. It’s funny how people are so mad Apple is better than their inferior PC that they actually want something that’s bad for them. Apple is the leading light that everyone follows, even if everyone isn’t buying it because it costs too much (or you can’t build your own gaming rig).
1) IA64 is not backwards compatable with IA32. If you want to run any existing Windows/DOS applications on the new boxes, then you need an emulator. VPC is better the BOCHS.
2) MSFT doesn’t handle virtual machines. When concolidating multiple small servers into one big server, its very common to use virtual servers. Examples: AS/400, RS/6000, and other mainframe level computers. What would you run on a 32 processor IA64 box that would require all that power? You don’t; what you do is create virtual Exchange, DHCP, Active Directory, and SQL servers.
Connectix has good software for doing both of these tasks.
“I love that guy that wants apple to die. It’s funny how people are so mad Apple is better than their inferior PC that they actually want something that’s bad for them.”
Would this also explaiin the Linux zealots that want Microsoft to die?
On the hypothetical scenario of Microsoft buying Adobe and/or Macromedia
“OK, if MS buys those, then Apple will just make equivalent apps. They don’t because Adobe and Macromedia are mostly compliant. And they have other things they are working on (Word and Excel replacements). ”
You say that like the apple developers can knock off a Photoshop replacement over the weekend and then write a Macromedia Flash clone the next week so long as they skip lunch.
Those are both very large and complex applications, with YEARS of development behind them. Even if they got a massive head start (say by buying a company which already has a fairly functional application to act as a base) Apple would be lucky to get their product out of the door in less than 12 months. If we add six months to actually find that original application and negotiate the purchase of it or the company, then you’ve got an 18 month delay minimum.
In the meantime Microsoft would have released at least one major release of each package, to which they’ve added a whole load of special effects and features that maybe everyone will think look stupid and dated in two years time, but this year they’re going to be all the rage.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that one of the attractions of photoshop and premiere is the number of third party plugins you can get, so Apple has to get those ported to their new application too….
So, all the professionals using these packages who are in competition with each other need the latest and greatest so that they don’t lose business to their rivals. So they have little choice, they go out and buy a PC and the latest version of the software.
When Apple finally bring out their rival applications…
1) Microsoft are betaing yet another version, with leather seats and go faster stripes.
2) The customers have invested in PC hardware, the Macs they may still have are probably getting a bit out of date, so they would have to justify yet more expenditure, and they’ve got used to the fact that all the filters and effects run so quickly. It’s strange, before they switched they thought it didn’t matter whether a filter took 6 seconds or 3, but now they’ve got used to it taking 3, it seems soooo slow going back.
3) All the plugin developers have released new plugins for photoshop only, they’d like to do them for the Apple thingy, but quite frankly they’ve got limited resources so they’ll stick to the most profitable route (i.e. largest market share).
4) The customers know Photoshop/Flash really well, they’ve been using it for years, they can’t really afford the time it would take them to learn a new application.
Net result, a huge chunk of those pros never switch back.
There was a time when Apple’s largest customer base was apparantly based around the likes of Photoshop, Flash, Premiere etc. I don’t know if it is still the case, but if it is, and Microsoft were to purchase those companies tommorrow and cut off development of Mac versions (much as Apple recently did in their purchase of Emagic) then Apple would be hit very hard indeed.
Update: A Microsoft executive said the company did not purchase the software to kill it, nor does Microsoft plan to stop developing its native Macintosh software, such as the Mac OS X version of Office.
Im glad M$ arent bastards like apple. Oh well Logic audio sucked anyway .. ever tried to make 2 tracks “live” at once with audio fx.. u cant.. its not cubase or sonar.. it simply cant do it so i guess its not big loss.
That’s what I was thinking. Windows can’t really scale well enough to take advantage of this, can it? Perhaps they’re working on something, but I have trouble seeing why people would spend a lot more money on a Microsoft solution when the performance they’d from Solaris on Intel must be better today and Linux will be better tomorrow. Windows has A LOT of catching up to do here.
I don’t know about everybody else here, but for me the world of big iron servers, (such as those that Microsoft is apparantly interested in using with Connectix) is a bit of a mystery.
Architectures, applications, performance criteria etc are all very different from the workstation or even a server for a small network. Whenever I read about some new machine from SUN or IBM I don’t even have a comprehension of who their clients are and what they will use it for, or of how many users it might handle, or any of the stuff that I either know or can extrapolate in the world of hardware ar a more individual level.
Does anyone know of any articles on this sort of thing? Nothing too heavy, but informative is good 🙂
“Microsoft solution when the performance they’d from Solaris on Intel must be better today and Linux will be better tomorrow”
lol go home sun sales rep.. Hows sun going in TPC these days? still to scared to release a benchmark?
And they don’t really care what they do harms humanity, either.
There is only one thing you can do with an enemy like that.
As a BeOS user, I will say “Resistance is not futile”. The future is in OUR hands. If they propose their own implementation to spec, we abandon the spec in favor of something else. Sorta like going from gif to png/jng/mng, or mp3 to ogg vorbis.
Develop the idea of a MS free(as in non-existant) way of thinking, and create a places on the net for such.
It is but a few things that should have been done long ago.
-obelix
“Apple has bought at least 2 companies in the past couple years and terminated the Windows versions. Time for Microsoft to get even. ”
The difference? Apple has 2.5-5% market share, MS has 90% market share… Monopolies don’t play by the same rules.
“Apple could have easily have turned around and said thats Ok, our customers wil just by the PC version & run it via VPC. ”
What is the point of writing your own OS for the purpose of running a competitors system? Do you think Jobs wants to have a selling point be “You can run Windows on a Mac”? ofcourse not, he wants to say “You don’t need Windows, you have a mac!”
Yes, having a classic/bochs style mode of emulating an x86 and running an OS as a native app (as classic runs os9 apps natively) would be cool. And having that as an option along with apple’s X11/Classic/Java(integrated in the mac) macosX looks like it can start running everything.
But again, apple wants people to run mac software, it wants to be independent, not dependent on another company or another platform.
why not vmware, in 6 month it wil be vmware who?
Microsoft spreads their OS over several architectures then use Virtual PC to emulate architectures and as a result one could write a programme for one archecture, say ARM and the MIP’s user can still run it.
“The difference? Apple has 2.5-5% market share, MS has 90% market share… Monopolies don’t play by the same rules. ”
How true! What Microsoft isnt allowed to do .. apple is.. and ppl complain about microsoft lol
Come to think of it .. if MS was a monopoly Apple wouldnt exist… perhaps we should say something like in an ologopoly where MS is bigger than Apple.. Apple should be allowed to lie cheat and screw up the industry in order to become a MS itself.
Not sure if this will clarify; When thinking of Sun and IBM think of Fortune 100 or Fortune 10 companies. It is not unusual for one of these companies to have a regional data center using Sun for payroll, human resources, and logistics data. Just think of companies like PeopleSoft and SAP for legacy systems. The reason most large enterprises use IBM and Sun is the reliability of the architectures, they are working on 24 hour a day 7 day a week access and are willing to pay for the added reliability. We used Windows exclusively on the desktop, but used Unix (HP AIX) for servers, firewall, and exchange. We were a heavy user of Windows software; think of any office application and we had versions from 97 through Win2K. What I am trying to say, I guess, is our company thought Windows was a viable product for desktops but did not think it scaled well for enterprise solutions on distributed and legacy networks.
WHY DIDN’T APPLE BUY CONNECTIX? Hello? Apple? Who is doing biz dev in Cupertino? I read the rumor sites today in total disbelief thinking, “There’s no way, it can’t be true. Apple wouldn’t be stupid enough to let this happen.”
Apparently, they are. Go figure.
As MS is a software company and not hardware. Meaning it earns money from selling software. I think they don’t care how you run their software as long as you bought it.
So if their is a market for running MS x86 software on a powerpc, the mac. Then who are they to refuse you from doing it if its a legal implementation.
In other words by keeping a VPC for Mac users they sell copies of windows to users how may never buy another hardware platform then made by Apple.
Only company who I can think of that doesn’t like the the powerpc is intel. But I should not worry to much about them buying Apple software products.
Christian
Apple bought the company that made Final Cut Pro and dropped the Windows Version. Now all the Mac aficionados brag about how Windows doesn’t have Final Cut. Duh. Apple also bought the company that made DVD Maestro… And it’s expected that the Windows version is basically toast. I don’t know why everyone on the board is so ready to vilify Microsoft for something they haven’t even decided to do yet when Apple does the same thing with respect to their acquisitions.
While I would generally frown on these types of practices, Apple’s not in business to help Microsoft, nor should they be. Conversely, Microsoft should feel no obligation (though the Justice Department might feel otherwise) to continue providing Virtual PC to Macs.
What Microsoft SHOULD do, however, is repackage Virtual PC as Virtual Windows and raise the price to cover the standard Microsoft tax for the OS. I’m sure the majority of Mac VPC users are using it to run Windows anyways (and it’s obviously not in MS’s best interests to produce a product that runs Linux). Where Microsoft should be concerned is whether Mac VPC users have paid for their Windoze licenses or not.
If Connectix was that critical to Apple’s business strategy, they would have bought them long ago. I may disagree with their overall business vision, but they’re not stupid.
If Microsoft decides to drop VirtualPC, all Steve Jobs needs to do is say “Bill, Screw You. We’re releasing OS-X on x86 within 12 months, and guess what? We’re BUYING VMWARE, CODEWEAVERS _AND_ TRANSGAMING and we’re going to spend MILLIONS making them work EXTREMELY WELL. How do you like ‘DEM APPLES?”
Apple bought the company that made Final Cut Pro and dropped the Windows Version. Now all the Mac aficionados brag about how Windows doesn’t have Final Cut.
Apple bought the code for Final Cut Pro from Macromedia in 2000. Macromedia was scrapping a video software project that was in developement at the time and Apple bought it and developed Final Cut Pro.
“How true! What Microsoft isnt allowed to do .. apple is.. and ppl complain about microsoft lol
Come to think of it .. if MS was a monopoly Apple wouldnt exist… perhaps we should say something like in an ologopoly where MS is bigger than Apple.. Apple should be allowed to lie cheat and screw up the industry in order to become a MS itself. ”
O please, a monopoly does not mean 100%. The commanding lead that MS has, however, does make them a monopoly. An oligopoly, you poor misinformed troll, would require several companies on fairly even ground working together to screw the enduser. Wether the user is getting screwed here is up to opinion, but apple and ms arn’t on even ground! there is a 85+% gap in market share! Apple does have leaway in things like buying software companies and such, they should. MS should not and does not have _as much_ room to buy companies, because, well, they are a monopoly; they are in a market without the basis of our economic structure: competition, atleast not on a realistic scale. The Gov decided long ago that if there is no competition, something should be done, and that means ms doesn’t play by the same rules as redhat, apple, sun or ibm.
and to those who think apple should have bought vpc…
what kind of a business is it if you are dependent on your competitor to survive? Do you think Jobs wants to NEED windows compat. on his mac platform? no! he wants to be independent.
Now let’s see where Microsoft makes their money. Intel processors? Nope. Motherboards? Nope. Hard disks? Nope. OS? Hell yeah – and their second biggest cash cow. Now VPC is a way to sell Windows to even more people, and I doubt either Connectix or Microsoft makes a lost from Windows sales to Mac users.
So enough conspiracy theories. I doubt Microsoft cares if Apple makes more sales – they are not a threat. As least with their current business model.
Oiy, Glenn, long time no see!
Apple may have bought code for an unreleased product, but if you dig back into history, Macromedia was planning on releasing the product on Mac and Windows NT. Are you suggesting that if Macromedia didn’t shift their focus towards the web at the time that no Windows version would have been released? My take on it is that Apple bought the intellectual property, and then just dumped the Windows code while proceeding with the Mac effort.
CNET article on Final Cut release date slipping in 1998:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-278476.html?tag=rn
No I’m not suggesting shit. Because I could care less about everyones conspiracy theories. I have better things to do with my life than debate about something I don’t control. LOL I was just stating where it came from. nothing more… nothing less…
What’s going to stop M$ from dropping support for Linux and Netware. For server Consolidation that would mean that you could only have multiple images of Windows on one box
Maybe purchasing Connectix isn’t about consolidating the server market, but removing theats against Microsoft’s Palladium. Connectix could have left Palladium useless.
Again, just a thought
…too little thinking.
Microsoft is not, I repeat NOT, interested in WTF is Virtual PC for Macintosh. I don’t believe they’ll scrap VPC for Mac, even that they’ll be bundling a Virtual Windows for Mac. Move along, there’s nothing to troll.
They’re interested in the huge gains VMware is doing with the ESX/GSX product family. A REAL HUGE market is appearing – companies needing to run legacy NT 4 apps – and VMware *and* Connectix are the players – now VMware and Microsoft.
(If someone is to by VMware, it’ll be Sun or IBM, maybe more the latter.)
I think you just explained why MS buying Adobe and Macromedia and cutting the Apple versions would cause huge antitrust problems for MS.
Also, I am not so sure that it would be as hard as you think for Apple to write equivalent apps. They could use parts of the Gimp for a photoshop equivalent. With MS owning Indesign, Quark might/probably sell out to Apple. So that takes care of page layout. There are other web design apps out there Apple could buy. Ezmedia has some interesting graphics stuff, also stone design.
What is the world apple would like best – I think it’s where they design every core app for the mac and open file formats and communication protocols are the norm so that it doesn’t matter what app you have as far as compatibility with the rest of the world. Right now Apple can’t have that with respect to Adobe. So MS taking them out might in the long run be better for apple.
Another thing is that Apple has this great development environment where you don’t need millions of lines of program-specific code for interface elements – like make up Photoshop, Office, etc. Apple seems to be developing apps with small teams of people – how many people worked on Keynote or Safari? I don’t get the impression there’s hundreds of people working on those.
So all these established apps that already put the tens of thousands of man hours into development of things like Photoshop and Office – no they are using carbon and not rewriting for cocoa. But apple isn’t tied to old code this way.
OK, VPC is a Pentium 2? emulator. Isn’t intel intending to phase out the pentiums and move to a new processor architecture? Isn’t emulation of the latest processors a bit tough? So how was VPC going to help there?
Second, isn’t MS planning on creating a middleware environment (.net) that can run on any OS, including linux and OS X, and then planning on moving all windows app development to .net?
Third, (as others have pointed out) isn’t Linux increasing its windows API support in things like codeweavers etc and isn’t that plus X11 a better solution than a processor emulator with all the overhead inherent in that?
Keynote and Safari is far easier to develop than a Photoshop clone. Why? In both cases, most of the features are already available in Cocoa, , they just need to fill in the rest. For example, the 3D effects with Keynote – I doubt they wrote everything from scratch instead of using Cocoa’s OpenGL-related APIs.
Meanwhile, from what I understand, both Safari and Keynote (both rather simple than either Office or Photoshop – Office BTW is far more than PowerPoint) took more than 18 months to develop. In that case, if they take that long (18 months) or longer, they may as well be too late.
Besides, personally, I don’t see any reason why Microsoft should kill Mac versions of Office, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. simply because it is a competitor. Do note that Apple is pretty much trapped in a small market unless they change their business model – something rather unlikely. So in other words, Microsoft would recieve absolutely no threat from Apple than the other way round. They may even make some money out of it.
And no, in the long run, if Apple provides everything from professional to consumer apps, it is hard to see how it would be good for them. Long term. It would probably alienate more developers. Meanwhile Apple would loose a significant market power – their pro users couldn’t stand around waiting for a Apple clone that might not have all the features of Photoshop (patents), nor the UI of Photoshop (more patents) or compatibility.
Microsoft just announced a new product: Virtual Mac. Comes bundled with Mac OS X so you can now run Mac apps in Windows.
OK, so MS buys Adobe and Macromedia. The dumbest thing in the world from an antitrust standpoint would be to halt sales of mac versions immediately. I agree with you MS won’t cut the mac versions. But as soon as MS makes the purchase, Apple gets busy. Then they spring the apps on the world when they are ready. They would have at least 18 months before MS would even think about cutting the mac versions (if they were even thinking about it).
Also, don’t forget the Gimp code apple could repackage, and Quark and web page design software that apple could buy. That would cut down on development time, keeping it within 18 months.
Why do so many people assume that Photoshop is the only application graphic designers use? Even if Gimp were a suitable replacment for Photoshop in professional situations, there’s still one BIG piece missing: a Illustrator/Freehand/CorelDRAW equivalent.
Yet another great product for the MacBU- the same team that *hasn’t* brought you:
* Explorer 6.0 for the Mac
* Windows Media Player 8.0 OR 9.0 for the Mac
* MSN for the Mac
* An OS X Exchange Client for the Mac
* An updated MSN Messenger for the Mac
But *has* brought you:
* A phony “switch” ad.
* The “Ms. Moxie” contest- an attempt at “girl power” that was only about three years too late.
* Never ending promises that “we are commited to supporting the Mac”.
MSFT is way miffed that IBM is buying Rational and all those nifty dev tools. MSFT will now be a 3rd-rate developer in the big-systems arena, not just 2nd-rate. So what does this have to do wtih VPC?
It’s because a careful reading of the press release and FAQ’s shows that MSFT is buying Windoze, Mac, and OS/2 versions of VPC, but killing only the OS/2 version. This is the version IBM has been using to hellp their midrange and banking/insurance people stay on OS/2. I know IBM supports & uses it because IBM has just done compat/interop testing of this product at their Raleigh, NC, facility. So buying this company and immediately killing the OS/2 version wastes IBM’s resources & time & ruins all the promises IBM has made over the past 1-2 years to their big customers wanting to stay on OS/2 but use Windoze and/or Mac products as guest products.
Now IBM’s up the proverbial tributary because they have no multiplatform virtualization tool. If MSFT was actually going to enter the virtualization market and go after IBM, MSFT would have kept supporting the OS/2 version as a draw for the companies they want to compete for. All they wanted to do here was do the monkey wrench thing on IBM’s plans and migration paths.
I agree with you MS won’t cut the mac versions.
And they won’t as long as the Mac version does makes money. As soon as it doesn’t, Microsoft has ample reason, antitrust-wise, to kill the Mac version.
Besides, I’m saying MS won’t cut the Mac version from the business standpoint. They won’t do that, with or without antitrust.
They would have at least 18 months before MS would even think about cutting the mac versions (if they were even thinking about it).
If you seriously think that Apple could write compatible, full-feature altenatives in 18 months for Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc…
Also, don’t forget the Gimp code apple could repackage
It is much faster to write Obj. C Cocoa code from scratch (or buying Corel’s PhotoPaint or Paint Shop pro) than to use GIMP’s GTK+ and C code and porting it to OS X (unless of course if they want to make use of X11)….
and Quark and web page design software that apple could buy.
Well, the only thing remotely as good (or somewhere close) to Dreamweaver is FrontPage (so if MS buys over Macromedia, they have two of the best web page WYSIWYG editors).
* Explorer 6.0 for the Mac
See point #3
Besides, I wonder what’s so great about 6.0 than 5.x? The only reason why it is 6.0 is because of Netscape.
* Windows Media Player 8.0 OR 9.0 for the Mac
Current versions of WMP for Mac can play 8.0 codecs. 9.0 is on the way. BTW, WMP for Mac is not the same as WMP on Windows – it is made merely for compatibility sake.
* MSN for the Mac
Anytime soon. That’s why Explorer 6.0 is delayed.
* An OS X Exchange Client for the Mac
Microsoft did a survey on their potential customers some time ago – the results are unfortunate, or so I heard. Plus to add for those who want Exchange capability aren’t in Entourage wouldn’t be using the Mac in the first place (*most* corporate enviroments don’t use Macs).
* An updated MSN Messenger for the Mac
See #3.
you say: “If you seriously think that Apple could write compatible, full-feature altenatives in 18 months for Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc… ”
No, it’s a combination of buying and writing and open source. They buy quark (probably dead as an independent if MS buys Adobe). They buy some draw program – that’s not rocket science. Office – they already have keynote and word and excel replacements are probably already in the oven. The other parts of office they already have – database, mail, address book.
That leaves photoshop – they could probably use some of the code from the gimp project for filters and so on, plus there’s lots of graphics code already in the OS. Also, every hear of Graphiconverter? It’s got 80 percent of photoshop’s features, its shareware and it sells for like $20. Apple could buy that author of that out, and just hire him.
Apple has 4.3 billion in the bank. I don’t think it could cost more than a small fraction of that to replace everything Adobe and Macromedia makes.
SMP is coming to VMware real soon now…
VMWare Scales Up
http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5703
Microsoft on VirtualPC for Mac…
“Virtual PC for Mac provides seamless integration of Windows on the Macintosh platform, enabling Mac OS customers to run Windows-based applications, access PC networks, use Windows-only Internet applications and share files with PC-based colleagues. Virtual PC for Mac will join the Macintosh Business Unit’s mix of award-winning Mac products, such as Office v. X, Entourage (TM) X and Internet Explorer for Mac.”
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Feb03/02-19PartitionP…