Parallels has enjoyed an early lead in the Mac VM market, but it is headed for serious competition from VMWare. I like Parallels, they are local boys and I wish them well, but VMWare is coming at them hard with Fusion. Its first release (it is in beta now) will include features such as Unity (VMWare's version of coherency mode), run from Boot Camp partition, DirectX 3D support, snapshot / backup, virtual SMB and the ability to run 64bit client OSs.
Both VMWare and Parallels have a feature that seems to have slipped below the radar but which I feel is the "killer app" for Mac switchers. On Fusion it is called the VMWare converter. On Parallels it is called Transporter. These utilities allow you to convert existing physical machines into virtual machines. This allows a new Apple convert to migrate his entire existing Windows machine (OS, software, data) to a virtual image and run it on his new Mac. Talk about reducing your risk. If I were Apple I'd be seriously hyping this capability.
The best thing about all this competition is that the price is being driven down. Both Parallels and Fusion are available for $40 (regular price is $80). Might as well get both, they're so cheap.
While it would be cool to run Windows games on the Mac, Apple doesn't really make great gaming hardware. Not a single nVidia 8800 Ultra to be found on any Mac.
A friend of mine at Adobe was just mentioning that they used Fusion on the Mac, and they had never heard of Parallels. That doesn't bode well!
I hope that friend of your's isn't a developer. To be any kind of geek and not know about Parallels would just be embarrassing.
No, not a developer. IT installed it on their computer, and they said it worked great.
Not Mac related but killer app related. We're using VMWare here on the server side and the whole physical to virtual conversion utility isn't bullet proof. We've seen it chew up Windows servers so far.
So, if people start loading up software and virtualizing on their Mac's and actually utilizing them for something more than iTunes, word processing and picture drawing then Apple may no longer be able to use the slogan "it just works".?