The lines between the Mac OS and Windows are starting to blur. And that portends major changes going forward in the world of PCs. At last week's MacWorld, a little company called Parallels won awards for the latest version of its hit product, which enables you to run both operating systems at the same time on a Macintosh. It's a major breakthrough.
While the last version of Parallels allowed you to run both operating systems at once, it still required you to switch back and forth between the two. Now, however, Parallels' Coherence product, which the company says will ship by mid-February, lets you keep multiple windows open on your desktop, just as you normally would, running a variety of applications. Except now you can switch between windows running Windows and Mac applications just as if they were all Mac. (Parallels costs $79, though Mac owners also have to buy a copy of Windows to use it.)
This is the fruit of recent major advances on x86-based computers in the technique called virtualization, a technique for isolating aspects of computing performance - sometimes hardware and sometimes software - so multiple functions can be underway simultaneously, while reducing the risk they will interfere with one another.
The tectonics of virtualization are shifting. It turns out that Parallels is not such a little company after all. About three years ago it was quietly purchased by an enterprise-focused virtualization company called SWsoft, a fact that has never been publicly disclosed until now.
Article Tags