Before I went off on my holidays recently I was treated to an invite-only online webnair on VMware Fusion. I couldn’t see who else was invited, but by the accents there was quite a few Americans – and the European voice that asked questions was mine. Still it was Friday at 6pm – and as we know, Europeans at 6/7pm are usually in the bar by that time!

To be honest I don’t have a strong position on Fusion. I’m not a MAC user, and never have done. Not that I am MAC hostile, in the slightest. In fact I’ve wanted for a while to be run the MAC OS on VMware legitimately. I currently know of only illegal hacks to get MAC on VMware ESX/Server. MAC OS X as understand it is only FreeBSD. But I guess neither Apple or VMware see a market for doing this – after all when people buy a MAC they are buying (in their minds) a piece of hardware not just an OS… If they had been talking  about Apple MAC VDI – now that would have been a really interesting  development – but I can’t see VMware doing that or more importantly Apple allowing them!

So I find it hard to evaluate the product because I have nothing to compare it too… unlike all those guys going on about “I can do X or > Y in parallels”…

So I spent conferrence call ear-wigging the other attendees. I took note of the lack of DirectX 9. This is also not present on Vista on ESX – which means if people want their fancy areo-glass experience they are not going to get it. More awwahh, than wow I guess… I doubt though that this will be a show stopper for MAC people, unless they want to run PC games…

I asked the guys at VMware about how large the market was for the product – because I wondering what kind of profit they are hoping to make with Fusion. Over in the UK MAC’s are pretty much exclusively used in media/publishing - although a lot of those Apps will run on PC’s now. As for “consumers” - although the iPod is as popular this side of the Atlantic as anywhere else – its really PC’s that dominate the home-user market…

So my reason for being there – was because that was the first time that VMware have gone out of their way to include me in a product launch. I figured there might be more on the way in future – so wanted  to get on that attendees list for future product releases.

Anyway, VMware got round to taking this web event together as a media presentation which you can view here if you are interested:

http://download3.vmware.com/demos/fusion/launchdemo2.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 9:10 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.