I don’t know how true this accusation is, especially considering that Parallels has offices in Renton, WA, and does business out of the U.S., but it raises eyebrows and I’d like to see it investigated a bit more closely.

That said, I use both VMWare and Parallels in my work, and I’ve come to really like both products.

I’m also on the VMware friend and family program. While the alpha version does have many glitches, I think the final product will look very attractive to the Mac market: it has a native Cocoa UI (some people will make their choice just based on that), which is extremely simple to use: no bells and whistles, no fuss, no technical jargon. It just works.

Also as far as your criticisms of Parallels on the Mac go, the reality is that none of those points really matter all that much to the vast majority of users. Mac users are predominantly using Parallels to run 32 bit Windows and with that, just a few applications that don’t have good options on the Mac yet. For that purpose there’s little need for anything else and Parallels is “good enough”. That’s my point, and that’s why VMWare really has missed the market. They may eventually emerge with a vastly superior product, they certainly have the technology to do it, but at the end of the day it also may not matter that much.

Finally my comments are specific to the Mac market only, I’m not saying anything about Virtualization on Windows, Linux or within the data center and I’m also not saying that Parallels has better technology than VMWare. I simply find it interesting to look at how things are playing out and to examine how different approaches affect success in the marketplace.

You write that Parallels stole the Mac virtualization market. I don’t think so. They are only known to the early adopters of Intel Macs. Only a tiny fraction of the Mac people have upgraded to Intel so far. I think VMware will be right on time to steal the lion’s share of that new market.

Even if you are right, and they stole everything. We are talking about a market as small as the Linux market (about 6% of all workstations). I don’t think VMware really cares. It might seem like Parallels has taken off when they made 50 millions this year with their product (and I’m being generous, assuming they sold a million copies of their software). But let’s put things in perspective: VMware will be a billion dollar software company in 2007. Read that last sentence again. How many such companies do you know?

VMware makes all of its money on the server. Make no mistake: VMware’s competition is not coming from Parallels, Russia. It is coming from Microsoft, Redmond. Until Parallels starts building their server product that is (haven’t they announced one?). But when they start doing so, it will slow down the development of their desktop product. You cannot have it both ways.

Parallels has a _long_ way to go before it can be considered a reliable virtualization solution. They have no support for 64-bit guests, no support for SMP virtual machines, no support for large memory virtual machines, no guest support for Linux or Solaris, poor USB support, inferior performance (at least on Linux and Windows, I haven’t compared on Mac OS yet obviously)…

As a Mac zealot, I care about buying quality products: I want the real deal. I have tolerated the use of Parallels for a while because there was nothing else. But as soon as VMware releases their beta 1 (scheduled before the end of year 2006), I’ll switch to it. I just hope the final product will be properly priced. I expect to see a lot of Parallels early adopters to do the same.