Stories about: Parallels

A group of five vendors has formed an alliance to help push Macintosh desktops into managed Windows environments on corporate networks.

Judging from initial accounts, the next version of the Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard, will be aimed squarely at business and enterprise users, signaling a formal push by Apple to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. "Apple is taking the Mac OS one step closer to the enterprise," says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Despite an outpouring of demand -- including more than 210,000 people who signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition, Microsoft held firm and Monday discontinued sales of XP in most cases. So, we bid adieu to Windows XP.

Microsoft announced on Thursday that Hyper-V was released to manufacturing, and then about two seconds later the media frenzy began.

Nearly 80 per cent of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the number that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said Thursday.

Oracle and SAP AG may still be bigger in enterprise applications, and Oracle in databases. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard may reap more IT dollars overall. But in the ways that really count, Microsoft remains the king of the IT industry.

I had an interesting conversation this past week with Ben Rudolph, former marketing guru at Parallels and now a member of the Microsoft Windows 7 team. Apparently, my recent pronouncement of death for his new charge struck a nerve. In addition to setting up a flurry of conference calls with his fellow team members, Ben picked my brain a bit about what I felt they needed to do/say to salvage their next generation desktop OS.

When Apple recently sent along one of its new iMacs -- a sweet 24-inch model with a 2.8GHz Penryn processor -- I agreed to take it home and give it a dose of family testing at the Finnie household. And with three kids aged 3, 6, and 16, that's saying something.

There are few clearer bellwethers as to the imminent direction of technology than where venture capitalists put their money. They're about making money, so they look for industry patterns they think will lead to sure bets. And that means they invest where the tech industry has begun to coalesce its thinking, not on exotic new science fiction. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, VCs have invested a total of US$57 billion in startups -- mostly tech ones -- in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

It has been just over six months since Mac OS X "Leopard" first shipped, bringing with it a slew of new features, a tweaked user interface, revamped underpinnings and -- as is often the case -- a healthy batch of complaints from users about problems. At the time, some in the Macintosh community even argued that Apple's new operating system was released before it was ready for prime time.

If I'm not otherwise engaged next Thursday morning, I just might spend my economic stimulus check to enter the PC server business. I could go shopping for a wholesale 1U bare-bones rack server, with my primary criteria being that it boot DOS from a floppy and require you to take your server off-line to change basic system settings. I'll stuff that two-socket black box with RAM, CPUs, and disks; charge you for your choice of Windows or Linux; and unless you're buying these things by the gross, stick you with desktop-grade support. Since I had no involvement in your server's design and engineering, I'll rely on BIOS and driver updates from my volume motherboard supplier. I'll selectively pass these on to you, flagged with warnings about how they may render your system unusable if you misapply them, until my supplier stops issuing them. Don't worry, you'll have a solid year before that happens.