Welcome Virtualization, Seriously
WWDC 2006 is only a few days away and the Macintosh development community awash with its annual pre-conference speculation. Brent Simmons, Gus Mueller and others have been at the head of the surge with predictions and wild ankle guesses about what we might see come Monday. Big fun!
One prediction–that Apple will include virtualization technology in Leopard–has generated some interesting debate about what that would mean for Mac developers. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba writes
In short, if high-quality virtualization (read: as seamless as Rosetta) occurs, developers all over the Mac will be left with a lot of new competition and the same size user base.
Here is my take: With a few notable exceptions(1), virtualization will not be of interest to the existing user base (more on why in a minute) but to people contemplating a switch and looking to preserve their investment in their current Windows software. This is good for Mac developers because it brings more potential customers to the platform–customers for whom well designed software is likely to be an eye-opening (and hopefully wallet-opening) experience.
By why wouldn’t existing users flock to Windows apps they can run in Leopard (if the rumors prove true)? For the same reason they don’t flock to X11 apps today–integration.
You see, users already have the option of running software from another platform on OS X. Some of it, like The Gimp is pretty good. But unless there is no native option available, the OS X-native apps usually win out for the simple reason that they are better integrated with the operating system and the other apps (like Address Book, Calendar, the iApps).
Where it might have an affect, though, is on the product plans of vendors that develop for both OS X and Windows. As Paul points out (and I’m paraphrasing here), Adobe could decide that developing two versions of Photoshop isn’t as appealing as developing for one and forcing the users of the OS with the lower market share to lump it with virtualization. One can almost hear the bean counters sharpening whatever they use to count beans with. However, any company already producing products for both platforms has an investment to protect as well–a user base with existing expectations. And it is in their interest to keep those users happy. Or someone else will do it for them.
(1) Mostly for software that just isn’t available on OS X.
