testing purposes... duh.

OK, sincere thanks MS for loosening the Vista license a bit, so I can install Vista on VMware or Parallels, if I so need to.

(Now onto Mac fanboy sarcasm.)

Woohoo.

Still, Mac wins here. It would only lose if Apple, for lack of sales, decided to license Mac OS to run on Gateway or Wal*Mart peecees. Vista is the one with the sales shortfall.

Microsoft, what's the deal with not being able to virtualize any of your various DRM schemes? Seems like you'd love to beef up Zune sales. Just think of it -- Zune Premium for Boutique OS Edition, with Swarovski crystals. You should sell it easily for $499, because, as everyone knows and constantly repeats, we love overpaying for hardware.

But let's say you've sold me. You've REALLY sold me. Yeah, I've know about the continous security nags, the hefty RAM and CPU/GPU requirements, and compatibility issues. I don't care! I want VISTA!

I'm gonna install Vista on all my Macs. I'll even run it on BootCamp, so I can use some of those new Zunes, too! Cause I want to Join The Social.

So, how much is a Vista Home Premium Family Pack?

VMWare is hugely popular in large enterprise deployments and is only getting more popular on the client too. Apple needs to allow OS X client to be virtualized. Here's a few examples of how we use it: - Security. Several servers use VMWare to serve up their Web pages so that if they are compromised, access to the server is limited to the VMWare session. - Software deployment and testing. Our IT department installs software on a machine running VMWare and runs it in the VM session before deploying it. We can save thousands in hardware and 100s of manhours by not having to buy a machine or wipe an existing machine clean just to install and test an application we want to deploy. -Regression testing. For example a Web developer may want to have 3 versions of Safari installed on their computer (Safari 1-3) to test on. Normally you would need 3 partitions or 3 computers. With VMWare you could have 3 VM images with the 3 versions of Safari on it, and test your Web site on a bunch of different browsers without ever having to restart your computer.

I can think of hundreds of other uses. VMWare is a way of life at many Fortune 500 companies now, and I have said to Apple before that the lack of virtualization of Mac OS X is hurting Apple in the enterprise space (by which I mean schools too).

...MS have just caught up with Apple by allowing all of their workstation OSs to be virtualised. But that's all MS really do - try to catch up.

Caught up? That's funny, since Apple never came close to MS in the first place.

Let's compare.

With Windows, you can install pretty much any version of Windows on any virtualized system (which can be running on any host operating system and any computer system).

With OS X, you are allowed to virtualize OS X Leopard server only. And, on top of that, ONLY on official Apple hardware.

So you can install pretty much any version of Windows on any type of computer running any type of host operating system.

But you can only run OS X Server on Apple hardware (technically, you could possibly run it with a Linux host operating system).

And how exactly is this "MS catching up"?

MacNN with it's sharp reporting skills_

I hate to tell Microsoft this, but Fair-Use would have allowed us to do this anyway without it's blessing.