Microsoft, VB on Mac Office 2007

In a very honest post, Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic, Erik Schwiebert from the MacBU goes into detail on the deep, technical reasons why VB is going to be left out of the next Mac version of Office.

The nuances of the painful decision, based on hard technical sweat, are shown in depth – and illustrate the quite common processes software companies have to go through when their platform mutates.

Maybe if the CLR goes MacOS, and the languages like C# make it to Mac, and there is a common Win Office/Mac Office object model – the world will be in a better place?

State of Mac Virtualization

MacWorld reports from the WWDC and an interview with Ben Rudolph of Parallels:

…”What’s more, Parallels Desktop for Mac will see “fast 3D graphics support,” presumably to help cater to gamers who want to run Windows games without having to reboot their machine”…

I’ve just updated to the latest Parallels beta; it was smooth and you can notice the graphics improvement. Being able to tweak the virtual environment/MacOS X is cool. Not ACPI BIOS yet, so no Vista install. Yet.

Now that Microsoft has left the MacOS X sphere, Parallels seems to be positioning itself at the consumer end of the market: games and ease of use. And increasing its distribution was a smart and calculated move.

This leaves VMware to the high end. As predicted here, two of the three predictions have come true; and according to a Macintouch interview with Dave Schroeder of VMware, the third is going to need customers to voice their needs to Apple. So it is not off the table, however we have Apple’s mantra/dogma of “MacOS X will never run on non-Apple hardware” to surmount.

It is within the realms of possiblity that Apple could create a version of MacOS X Server that had a distinct, non-desktop personality (desktop APIs removed), and checked for either Apple or VMWare “virtual hardware” — creating a stable, enterprise level Unix. This leaves customers to choose either XServe hardware with MacOS X Server, or VMware virtual hardware with MacOS X Server. The result is a live market test and ROI of being in the highly competitive and fast moving blade server marketplace.

Leave the desktop MacOS X to run on Apple hardware only.

There must be a gaggle Product Managers and Finance-types deep inside of Cupertino running their pivot tables in Excel to argue both sides of the equation. The sales of the these new XServes in the next 2-3 quarters will predict the future of MacOS X Server on a virtualization platform.

Interesting Historical Statistics

As a part of the transition of my blog entries from the old PHP-based Mungenetengine to PHP-based WordPress I’ve needed to categorize and title my older posts.

It has been interesting noting certain milestones:

  • Total blog posts: 371
    Which totals 5.6 posts per month, on average over the last 5.5 years.
  • Started Weblogging: January 2000
    5.5 years of blogging, more if you go right back! to 14th July 1997. That’s over 9 years personal presence on the web. Also, as a point of reference, www.nickhodge.com is still not as large at the Fairfax@Atlanta site dynamically assembled through 5 intense weeks in the internet dark-ages of 1996. The web is 15 years old today, so I’ve been publishing for 66% of the “life” of the www.
  • Implemented under self-coded PHP with MySQL backend: December 2001
    The decision to put data in a database has rewarded this site many times, although not in ways originally intentioned. A code review shows some lines and functions being 5 years old. Oh the horror of some of the PHP.
  • Implemented SOAP for Neil Finn Lyric Server: June 2002
    As web services started to emerge, I’d decided to see how difficult they were to implement. With various clients on different languages and platforms, and struggling with WSDL – this service is still working today. At as last night, the server had processed over 100,000 requests.
  • Implemented RSS Feed: July 2002
    Before feed-readers were parts of browsers and operating systems, and before I really knew why I was doing this – coded a RSS feed for this site.
  • First Moblog Entry: July 2002
    Implemented a quick gateway for SMS-to-Blog entry system, and tapped out an entry from a remote device.
  • First Wikipedia Reference: October 2003With the recent world awareness of Wikipedia, my first posting and reference is way-back. According to Wikipedia, the number of entries was less than 200,000.

VMWare Player for MacOS X

Pre-register your interest for the VMWare Player for MacOS X 10.4. No comments on requirements, etc – but at least we are heading in the correct direction. Now Mac users can run those self-contained appliances, easily.

Update: 11:25am 8th August: “Working in the labs…” Srinivas Krishnamurti of VMWare talks about the forthcoming MacOS X version of their virtualization software. Of note is the quote “This product will allow you to create and run virtual machines on OS X” and “virtual machines created with this product are fully compatible with the latest release of other VMware products“.

Virtualization, MacOS X Server

Silicon Valley Sleuth writes a short article on the appearance of VMware at WWDC. It’s about more than just the desktop OS.

Here is another pie-in-the-sky, non-desktop scenario:

  • Apple releases new versions of both their Xserver and the MacOS X Server.
  • Xserve becomes a tested and supported platform for VMWare Server and more importantly VMware’s ESX Server. This will permit new Intel-based XServes to be installed into Datacenters with their heads held high. VMware endorsement is cred Apple needs to go to the next revenue level with their servers.
  • An implementation of Leopardized MacOS X Server will run on non-Apple hardware on VMware. This is a counter-punch to the recent Xen/Microsoft/VMware wrangling. Now MacOS X Server can run on a stable and supported platform (VMware ESX) rather than the multitude of hardware configurations found in the Intel world.

So, what’s the net-net of this? Apple has VMware supported as an application on MacOS X desktop; endorsement of their blade server environment and more sales of MacOS X Server without the support hassles.

VMware gets unique and in-demand server OS with excellent corporate support. Rather than IS managers adopting the Linux/Intel “build it yourself” approach; a supported platform is important.

It is not so much about the desktop, but the server.

The next few days will be very interesting!