A Mac virtualization plan that would ‘kill’ Windows, Dell?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 4, 2007 at 1:31am
American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu thinks that Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) may have virtualization features far beyond the “rebooting into Windows” capability of Boot Camp. I’m a bit dubious, but Apple has pulled off shockers before. And this is one I’d love to see.
Wu is one of those hoping for “virtual machine” technology that allows users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously without restarting. “If so, we believe this would serve as a major catalyst for Mac sales,” Wu told clients on Friday. “We continue to believe the key reason Leopard was delayed until October was to give developers time to test secret features.”
And in his CyberPsych blog pundit Les Posen says that “making Leopard able to run Windows apps without Windows” could be a “sweet two-fer” that would “knock Dell stock through the floor” and “give a mighty whack to one half of the Microsoft cash cow partnership, Windows OS.”
Posen would also love to see ‘07 versions of iLife and iWork that would give Office a run for its money. He says that Keynote 4 would, in his fantasy, become the multimedia presentation tool of choice, integrated with iTunes now that iTunesU is available online, and more and more students and faculty are discovering Keynote’s qualities in eliciting creative and persuasive messaging. He’d also love to see iWork add a “truly simple Filemaker Lite, and some kind of funky PDF collator similar to Yep.”
“Ah … what a sweet fantasy that would be,” he says. “No need for Windows OS. Never happen in a million years, would it?”
I’m skeptical, but, man-o-man, wouldn’t such moves be great? It would really kick things into high gear for Apple. It would reinforce Apple’s commitment to the Mac. And it would make our favorite tech firm THE company to watch (as if it isn’t already).
WWDC will be held June 11-15 in San Francisco at the Moscone West convention. Apple CEO Steve Jobs will kick things off with a keynote address beginning at 10 a.m. on Monday, June 11. Guess we’ll see then what’s going to happen.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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