Apple's recent acquisitions pale to Microsoft's buyout of the week.
And that, of course, is the announcement that Microsoft is buying the virtual machine products from Connectix. Connectix makes, among other products, Virtual PC, the most effective way of running non-Macintosh operating systems such as Windows on your Mac.
A lot of doomsayers cried foul, and I was among those for a few hours until I learned that the Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft, which makes the very usable Microsoft Office X for Mac OS X and Internet Explorer, will get to work the software. Further, Microsoft will inherit the VPC developers, so it will not be like starting over again.
The major benefits to the buyout are clearest to those who remember Microsoft's mantra: Money, Money, Money. Most copies of Virtual PC shipped with a licensed copy of Windows 2000, ME, or XP Professional. Those 1 million sales didn't hurt Microsoft. Now, since they own a virtual machine, they can improve on it to match Windows capabilities. And now, Microsoft will get cash on the VM as well as the OS sold with it.
For instance, one thing that Connectix has never improved upon since VPC appeared in 1997 was its video card emulation. The emulated S3 card used only 4MB of video RAM. That's likely one reason why VPC is slow to handle complex graphics. Enter Microsoft, who has time and resources to bring the virtual machines closer to their actual counterparts.
Another benefit is sheer, virtually unlimited resources to improve Virtual PC. Microsoft could go many directions with VPC, such as integrating it strongly with its Office X products so that, if you double-click a Word document in the virtual machine, it will open it through the Mac's copy of Word. Refining its Pentium II emulation couldn't hurt, either.
The dark side of any Microsoft application is the glacially slow time it takes Microsoft to acknowledge bugs, much less correct them. Macintosh applications from Microsoft are less filled with bugs overall than the mainstream Windows applications, but it's still very important that Microsoft move more quickly to update VPC when problems occur, or to at least acknowledge the matter and present workarounds until a permanent repair is available. Connectix was very good and usually timely in keeping up with repairs. This timeliness is becoming a significant factor now that Apple and other companies exhibit open-source-style enthusiasm and speed in fixing even the slightest vunerability or serious bug within days of its discovery. The first Safari beta and its quick update after a nasty directory-deleting bug arrived within 8 days of each other, if memory serves.
Other dark points: Microsoft also overprices their software. If they do that, the open source world, which has sat in the background to VPC because of its performance, power and versatility in comparison to the most popular VMs, WINE and VMWare, might stick their neck out and make a Mac OS X virtual machine to rival Microsoft Virtual PC. Don't laugh--Virtual PC hit the ground running with version 1.0 against the staid, slow, inefficient Insignia Solutions product, SoftWindows. SoftWindows could only run a customized version of Windows, and it didn't do it well. Once VPC arrived, SoftWindows was doomed. No one is king forever, although many of us hope that VPC continues its reign.
Apparently the Blizzard of 2003 also reached Hell and snowball fights are beginning, because Quark has finally announced QuarkXPress 6, which will work as a Mac OS X-native application only. Is it too little, too late? We have to wait and see.
Quark is still an established player in the DTP world, but many Mac OS X users couldn't wait and moved to the ever-improving Adobe InDesign. Further, my experience with Quark is to never, ever use a "point-O" version of QuarkXPress in wide production. Quark is notoriously bad in creating incompatibilities, bugs, and other oddities that can shut down publishing very quickly. Quark was one of the nastiest applications to support, even when version 4 finally received enough patches to be usable.
I've about had it with my company PowerBook G4. Its wireless connectivity is worthless because Apple placed its AirPort antennas in such a way that signal strength is very poor, despite the signal strength meter's (inaccurate) information. I used another application, MacStumbler, to verify that I could never get greater than 53% signal strength--even when I stood with the PowerBook next to the damned Lucent base station. It's the self-assigned 169.254 address game, where AirPort can't or won't find a DHCP server. It's possible that AirPort takes too short a time to listen for a DHCP server. However, I have no idea how to tell AirPort to increase its search time. If you have an idea, drop me a line at kevspencer at yahoo dot com.
10:19:02 PM 
|
|
