These Things Matter to Me
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Sun buying Virtualbox-maker Innotek
(Screenshot of a Windows guest in a Mac OS X host, using VirtualBox)
Most Ubuntu users have long known about Virtualbox, the confusingly-versioned (they have an "open source" version, and a "full" (their word, not fine) version ) VMware Workstation-like tool. It's been in Ubuntu repositories for a while, and I like it quite a bit, though it's never displaced VMware Workstation in my life.
I've been especially excited about the fact that they have a beta version of VirtualBox for the Mac, making it so users on all major platforms can have a similar experience and trade virtual machines around.(Yeah, I know that VMware Fusion virtual machines are pretty much interchangeable with VMware Workstation/ VMware Player machines, but there is no free VMware product for Mac users, so I hate having to check ahead/download trials for users, etc).
In any case, Sun is buying Innotek, and I think it's great. Let's hope they don't pour Java into it! (just kidding. kind of.) One thing that I think has hurt Sun is that it doens't make consumer products. Something Microsoft benefits from, and now VMware, is that consumer behaviors drive corporate decisions. People achieve consumer comfort with a product, and extend the relationship at work. Sun's Scott McNealy would just rail against Microsoft quality. It's not always about quality! It's about not wanting to venture into the unknown. Sun having an easy to use desktop product like VirtualBox is actually pretty unique for them, and a really great change. (Apologies if they make all sorts of other consumer apps I don't know about.)
(Screenshot of a Windows guest in a Mac OS X host, using VirtualBox)Most Ubuntu users have long known about Virtualbox, the confusingly-versioned (they have an "open source" version, and a "full" (their word, not fine) version ) VMware Workstation-like tool. It's been in Ubuntu repositories for a while, and I like it quite a bit, though it's never displaced VMware Workstation in my life.
I've been especially excited about the fact that they have a beta version of VirtualBox for the Mac, making it so users on all major platforms can have a similar experience and trade virtual machines around.(Yeah, I know that VMware Fusion virtual machines are pretty much interchangeable with VMware Workstation/ VMware Player machines, but there is no free VMware product for Mac users, so I hate having to check ahead/download trials for users, etc).
In any case, Sun is buying Innotek, and I think it's great. Let's hope they don't pour Java into it! (just kidding. kind of.) One thing that I think has hurt Sun is that it doens't make consumer products. Something Microsoft benefits from, and now VMware, is that consumer behaviors drive corporate decisions. People achieve consumer comfort with a product, and extend the relationship at work. Sun's Scott McNealy would just rail against Microsoft quality. It's not always about quality! It's about not wanting to venture into the unknown. Sun having an easy to use desktop product like VirtualBox is actually pretty unique for them, and a really great change. (Apologies if they make all sorts of other consumer apps I don't know about.)
Labels: business, consumer, fusion, innotek, player, sun, ubuntu, virtualbox, virtualization, workstation
Monday, June 25, 2007
blah blah blah iPhone. The empty ring of the word "enterprise," and why business IT needs to understand consumer products.
LOLz to Anil Dash, who tweeted:
What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),
In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.
So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!
Related:
"To people in line for iPhone: people lined up for Windows 95, too, which was equally popular and revolutionary. In 2019 you'll understand."Now, don't you dare run off and think the point of this post is to mock the iPhone. I'm here to defend it. As a consumer, I'm uninterested the iPhone at this moment (that was Anil's point), but as usual, I'm writing in defense of logic and reason. And the iPhone FUD going around now is ten times more ridiculous than the iPhone hype (though seriously campers, y'all crazy). And so here I am, attempting to temper the FUD, and ignoring the hype.
What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),
“We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says."Uh oh! It sounds like the iPhone is not... (wait for it). Ready for the enterprise. Well, then, can we give it an award? Can businesses buy them by the barrel? Because in my experience supporting the enterprise, products and tools that are "made for the enterprise" can be as ill-defined and ill-suited for business purposes as anything else out there. And in the past few years, the most useful tools and services appeared first in the consumer space before being integrated into enterprise products. The enterprise can not be assumed to be the place where quality and reliability appear first. It's the place where entitlement and shoddiness get away with murder for years, in the shadows of years-long commitments, contracts and decision-making cycles. The enterprise is where concerns about sharing too much about internal business processes keep problems about information technology tools hidden from view.
In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.
So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!
Related:
- John Gruber + Daring Fireball's Exchange Exchange (shuts down the whole iPhone security concern. don't even try to go there)
- The rise and fall of the 'enterprise' class distinction
Labels: anil dash, apple, consumer, enterprise, enterprisey, iphone, mobile
Monday, December 04, 2006
Parallels to VMware: It's On!
But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of "abstraction." Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS's windows, there is a "coherence mode" option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!
(demo video via video blogger Michael Verdi and blip.tv)
Wowza... So... Parallels for Mac OS X has been out a for a bit. But it's previously been best described as "...like VMware Workstation for a Mac." In other words, cool, but nothing beyond VMware, and if VMware actually had a product out for OS X, then you'd probably grab that.But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of "abstraction." Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS's windows, there is a "coherence mode" option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!
Labels: apple, consumer, fusion, information technology, IT, mac, microsoft, os x, parallels, software, sysadmin, virtualization, vmware
Thursday, November 30, 2006
VMware Fusion video! (More) virtualization for Mac OS X is close.
VMworld, virtualization software company VMware's big conference was a few weeks ago.
Among the stuff presented was VMware Fusion. Even though it's not the first virtualization product for Mac OS X , it's definitely the one people have been most excited about.
I'll let the video do the talkin'.
Among the stuff presented was VMware Fusion. Even though it's not the first virtualization product for Mac OS X , it's definitely the one people have been most excited about.
I'll let the video do the talkin'.
Labels: apple, consumer, fusion, mac, os x, software, sysadmin, virtualization, vmware
