the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

HowardG — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 02:56:39 GMT

Thanks for the great post Nadyne. There's no doubt that the loss of VPC has ruffled a few feathers with some of the Mac users out here. Having been a VPC tech support lead, I'll miss not getting to see what was going to be new in v8, and wish v7 a "fair winds and following seas" as it sails off into the sunset.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Asam Bashir — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 05:37:33 GMT

Super write up Nadyne, did you get to meet his Steveness? Do tell us poor souls who couldn't make it to the WWDC how it was :)

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 07:45:05 GMT

Sorry, the WWDC NDA prevents me from answering any questions about anything that wasn't addressed at the keynote. ;)

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Asam Bashir — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:17:17 GMT

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Ben — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:05:01 GMT

What I don't understand is that apparently Apple can port their entire OS and application suite (maintaining backwards portability), create an translation layer for old apps do much much more while they are at it, whilst mighty Microsoft finds it too much work (and hasn't up till now) to port a handful off apps? Isn't there a huge gap in ambitioin and talent there?

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Geoff Wilson — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:00:21 GMT

It is sad to see the end of a great product, but given the choice between VPC and the rest of the products produced by the MacBU ...

I'm glad of the decision made. Porting the other MacBU concerns to MacTel must be a significant effort in and of itself!

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

John Lockwood — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:20:04 GMT

Microsoft's termination of VPC (for Mac) is actually one of the more reasonable decisions by Microsoft and I as a long time user have absolutely no problem with this. Of course my being sanguine about this is helped by the fact there are superior alternatives now available.

However there are plenty of other areas where Microsoft have, do, and will I am sure continue to make really bad decisions (from a Mac perspective and in some cases even from a Microsoft perspective).

1. MSN Messenger / Microsoft Messenger / Live Messenger / [Insert this weeks new name] on the Mac continues to lack Video and Voice capabilities. Microsoft have announced that they are working on Messenger 6.1 for Mac and I have 100% confidence that 6.1 will not change this. This is despite the fact that this feature has been the number one request by TENS OF THOUSANDS of people for years and years. Microsoft should realise the one of the reasons Skype has been so successful is that unlike Microsoft they fully support multiple platforms including of course the Mac. This means with Skype Mac users can now do Video (as well as voice) and even have a selection of USB handsets to choose from.

2. Microsoft have discontinued WMP for Mac. Ok fine, good riddance it was awful anyway. However while they have given their blessing to Flip4Mac as a replacement they have not provided Flip4Mac the means to add support for WMV and WMA DRM (Microsoft's statement that Windows DRM is an open standard is shown as being the flasehood it is, at least Apple don't claim their Fairplay DRM is an open standard). This means Mac users cannot (even if they were foolish enough to want to) access Windows DRM protected media. This in turn harms Microsoft because there is then no chance on earth of a Mac user being converted to using a Zune player for example [Ha, ha!].

3. The death of VBA in Office for Mac. VBA support is apart from the brand name, probably the single major reason for Mac business users buying Microsoft Office for Mac as it has historically been the only way to ensure a fairly good level of compatibility with Office for Windows. Without VBA support then you are limited to plain vanilla .doc and .xls files which can already be used in a large number of alternative (and often free) programs. Now I understand the difficulties that porting VBA to XCode and Intel Macs may represent (but unlike Microsoft I don't believe it would be impossible, one option would be to re-write the Mac VBA code from scratch rather than porting the current ancient code which I realise is itself not a simple task). Now just discontinuing VBA for Mac support is bad enough, but Microsoft have completely failed to indicate _IF_ (never mind when) they would replace it with the new VBA replacement that Office for Windows will also need to adopt in the future (apparently VBA for Office for Windows is equally hard to port to 64bit processors).

On top of this is the fact that the only totally new software product from Microsoft for Mac for possibly the last ten years is Remote Desktop Client (Entourage is little more than a resurrected Outlook Express), while during the same period product after product after product has been discontinued. Halo does not count as a new software product as it was effectively an existing Bungie product, and I also disallow mere upgrades.

Where is Flight Simulator for the Mac? There is a humungous pent up demand for that. (I would think easily in excess of 6 figures and quite possibly 7.)

Encarta - RIP
AutoRoute - RIP
MS Flight Simulator - RIP, gone but not forgotten
MS Money - MIA
Windows Media Player - KIA
VPC - Shot as a deserter (from PowerPC)
Internet Explorer - Mercy Killing
Office VBA - Committed Suicide

One could add...

Microsoft Messenger - Persistent Vegetive State

...due to Microsoft wilfully refusing to add Video and Voice capabilities.

Microsoft's efforts can be summed up by paraphrasing Sir Winston Churchill

...Never in the field of software development, has so little been produced by so many for so long.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:06:35 GMT

Ben - I think there are two things working in Apple's favour here: time and resources. Apple ported a whole OS over to the Intel chip, but as they said when they announced the transition, they had been compiling OS X for on Intel since 10.0. They had five years of work that they were putting into it without anyone knowing. The rest of us had to scramble when the announcement was made to take this into account in our product plans. Across all Mac apps (not just ours, think of Adobe and everyone else too), how many dev-years were added unexpectedly because Apple made this decision?

Likewise, Apple has a few more people writing Mac apps than we do. The whole of MacBU is ~180 employees. How big is Apple? A quick websearch puts that number at ~16,000. Discounting the small corner of the iTunes team that produces the Windows version, they're all working on Mac apps and hardware.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Krishen — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 04:48:59 GMT

Great post Nadyne. It's good to hear the story from someone directly involved in the product.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

wpSlider — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 05:32:14 GMT

Excellent post.

If I was someone developing on Macs I would have given up on them ages ago, isn't this the 3rd time they've change CPU architectures?

I wonder though, if Connectix had not been acquired by MS, would *they* have ported it to MacTel?

I think the Mac (mainly due to OSX and now running on intel cpus) is a platform where you guys can't afford not to be present. Think about it.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:56:01 GMT

wpSlider - That's an interesting question, and one that I've thought about. I'm not a part of the original Connectix team, so I can't speculate. But even without my speculation, one important thing to point out is that Connectix was a pretty small company with a pretty small portfolio of Mac products. For them, the resource question would have been a different one. The engineering effort involved with doing the MacTel port would have been the same, of course, but if there's not something else that really needs your attention at the same time, there's a much smaller opportunity cost involved in spending the time working on this instead of working on that.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Sprocket999 — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 01:35:32 GMT

I can't speak for the efforts of the Connectix team regarding VPC, but I sure do applaud their efforts with RAMDoubler. I used that routinely through the 90s with ZERO issues on all my PowerBooks -- and running Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I think '8' was their finest effort. Gone, but certainly not forgotten.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Asam Bashir — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:39:29 GMT

Play Station Emulator wasn't bad either - very missed - sure new Intel Macs could do PS2 now or something else.... , maybe even classic emulator for Intel Mac's - not had time to try that sheep saver though.

RAMDoubler was invaluable in the early days, my Mac experience would not have been the same without it.

Yah I know Sony would get in the way - early days we just didn't give a %^&& - it was war back then, the frontlines...

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Asam Bashir — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:45:18 GMT

http://homepage.mac.com/asam/.Pictures/marvin/borg-desk.jpg

http://homepage.mac.com/asam/.Pictures/marvin/Segadesk.jpg

A long time ago :/

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Louije — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:15:16 GMT

VPC:Mac for Intel processors didn't make sense anyway. VPC is an emulator, "porting" it to Intel would have meant getting rid of the emulation part and replacing it with virtualization. Now, of course such "search and replace" isn't easy (or possible) in this case. VPC, with its drag and drop ease of use, was a wonderful product, and I don't doubt the new virtualization software for MacTel will equal it in time.

The real question remains : if VPC only made sense for PPC Macs (which are still the vast majority out there, if I'm not mistaken), why was development on version 8 axed, and what will happen to the product anyway (I guess Microsoft is not going to give it away for free...) ?

Thanks for posting insider information.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 21:04:26 GMT

Louije - It's hard to justify development on a product for an architecture that is now obsolete, and which more and more people are moving off of every day. It's also confusing to users to get a new computer and not be able to buy just-released software for it.

As for VPC v7, we'll continue to sell it for as long as people want to buy it. It's still the best virtualisation solution for PPCs.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

RMansfield — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 07:12:42 GMT

Here's a suggestion. Release v. 8 for those of us who use v. 7. I would guess there has to be quite a lot of us out here. Releasing v. 8 as the last version of VPC would be better than killing it altogether. You'd be able to recoup something on it that way.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:08:08 GMT

RMansfield - It's not as though we could release v8 today. By the time that a PPC-only v8 were ready for prime time, what would the market look like? How many people who were still on a PPC and who use VPC would *want* to upgrade to VPC v8? How much confusion would we create by making a brand-new PPC-only piece of software?

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Louije — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:57:50 GMT

Convincing enough !...

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

eponymous coward — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 06:55:38 GMT

They had five years of work that they were putting into it without anyone knowing.

You've got to be kidding me. The rum0rz of X being built for Intel made it to me (Google "Marklar Mac OS X"), and I have NO juice at One Infinite Loop. Plus, come ONNNN, remember: Mac OS X = NeXTStep5.0. Which was an Intel beastie before it went to PPC. ;)

The point is that Cocoa apps go very nicely across platforms and chip architectures. Carbon and PPC assembly code? Not so much.

Discounting the small corner of the iTunes team that produces the Windows version, they're all working on Mac apps and hardware.

The Quicktime team at Apple says "Hi", Nadyne. ;) But OK, it's a fair point.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 07:31:59 GMT

eponymous - Yeah, the rumours have been around forever. But rumours don't mean that it'll actually happen (and I really don't have to point to all of the Apple rumours that haven't (yet) come about here), or when they'll happen. It's not as if we could've just kept open a couple of dev-years on our schedule for this and hoped that someday we'd have something to fill that time. I suppose you could argue that, in essence, that's what we've had to do, it's just that the dev time that we cut was already allocated to other features and not to massive back-end work.

I am embarrassed that I forgot about the QuickTime team, though. Sorry, guys!

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

John C. Welch — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:24:58 GMT

You've got to be kidding me. The rum0rz of X being built for Intel made it to me (Google "Marklar Mac OS X"), and I have NO juice at One Infinite Loop. Plus, come ONNNN, remember: Mac OS X = NeXTStep5.0. Which was an Intel beastie before it went to PPC. ;)

No one in their right mind is going to maintain two codebases of something the size of Office based on a rumor. As well, check out some of the posts from Rick Schaut and some of the Adobe folks. It's not like Apple's Dev tools could have really handled the job until recently anyway.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

John C. Welch — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:19:19 GMT

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

eponymous coward — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 04:11:13 GMT

John, read my next sentence in my post. Carbon apps don't port as well as Cocoa ones, generally because you tend to spend time rolling your own ___ (fill in blank), and thus when Apple does the Lucy routine with the Mac OS football, Microsoft and Adobe get to play Charlie Brown and go "auuuuugh!" as they lie down on the field.

Apple's done this so many times, it's not even funny. I know people who did QuickDraw GX integration work in apps, fergawdsake.

<I>As well, check out some of the posts from Rick Schaut and some of the Adobe folks</I>

I'm somewhat familiar with the posts you mention, John, as I've commented on them.;) I'm not saying Microsoft COULD have zagged when Apple went from zig to zag. It's more like a deliberate engineering choice that has tradeoffs- and a Carbon app with custom PPC tuning like VPC always gets hosed hardest on things like this.

Engineering tradeoffs suck- but they are essential sometimes.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

John C. Welch — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 23:48:09 GMT

Well, there's also the issue that for a long time, there was no way in hell you could build Office in Xcode with a dev target AND all the debugging symbols on a 32-bit machine.

Codewarrior, however, could.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

anonymous — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:58:55 GMT

I thought that Microsoft bought Connectix mainly to get Virtual PC for Windows and that VPC for Mac was just a bonus.

Virtualization is all the rage: the ability to run several versions of Windows/Linux/whatever on servers.

So the real question is: why not take VPC for Windows and port _that_ to Mac OS X (intel only on course)?

We're talking virtualization, not emulation now anyway on macIntels.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Marcelo R. Lopez, Jr. — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:00:09 GMT

And here I was hoping that VPC 8 would've addressed the issue with not being able to install SQL Server 2005 Standard on my AlPB.

VS2005 installs fine, MSDN ditto, but when it gets up to the point where it's going to actually start the server inside the VM, it dies, closes the server, and then proceeds to exits the install. The install itself never quite finishes. I've searched high and low and no one seems to have even tried this. Am I the only one ?

Oh well, and here I was trying to forego actually moving back to my Dell just for .NET stuff. Grrr

any ideas anyone ?

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Jay — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:08:47 GMT

This is a very reasonable explanation for why Virtual PC was killed. In fact, all of the explanations that have come forward for killing Microsoft Mac applications have been reasonable. It is only when you look at the trend line that I think people can rightly be concerned about Microsoft's long-term commitment to the Mac. What is left? Messenger and Office (sans Visual Basic)? How long until Microsoft (reasonably of course) explains is doesn't make sense to continue developing for Macs because everything can be run via some third-party virtualization solution?

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 19:01:58 GMT

anonymous - For an application that sits as close to the metal as VPC does, porting from Windows is much more difficult than it is for other apps (and it's already a difficult prospect for other apps). Had we gone forward with VPC v8 for the MacTels, we might have had a mix of updating existing code, porting VPC:Win code, and starting over from scratch in some places.

Jay - MacBU is in a pretty good position. We're a profitable business, and we have (and will continue to have) Mac-only features that we develop specifically for our Mac users. At MWSF2006, we announced another five-year commitment to continue to develop Office:Mac. We did this to help alleviate concerns like this one, even though we had been operating for a couple of years without a formal commitment and had no intent of stopping. After all, we released Office:Mac 2004 after our previous formal commitment had expired, and there were a couple of versions of Messenger during that time, not to mention the addition of Remote Desktop Connection to our portfolio.

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

life long pc user soon to be MAC user — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:53:07 GMT

I am considering a MAC for the first time because of VMWare adding support for MAC. I have always used PC's but have always wanted a MAC. I am honestly glad to see the MAC VPC gone, I have never been happy with the limited functionality of VPC as it is compared to VMware.

"VMware Announces New Product for Apple Mac OS X Users
New Intel-based Macs will be able to Simultaneously Run Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris". I am not a VMware employee, Microsoft, or Apple.

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/mac.html

I use VMware for my Job everyday. It has made my Job so much easier and now with the additional support for MACs. Here I go...

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

nadyne — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 03:21:00 GMT

Lifelong - If you're gonna buy a Mac, you're gonna have to remember that it's Mac and not MAC. ;)

re: the life and death of Virtual PC for Mac

Manish — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:01:18 GMT

I am always surprised why people don't talk about Apple not porting THEIR apps to Windows? Microsoft has 95% market share so it would be much more profitable for Apple to make Windows apps than it is for Microsoft to make Mac apps. Aren't we a little biased here?

http://google.com.my/search?hl=en&q=virtual+pc+v7+connectix&btng=google+search&meta=

TrackBack — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:42:28 GMT

http://google.com/search?q=vpc+mac&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official

TrackBack — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:43:35 GMT

http://google.ca/search?q=virtual+pc+mac+linux&hl=en&lr=&start=60&sa=n

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:34:41 GMT

http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2006/09/01/736025.aspx

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:34:53 GMT

http://google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&sa=x&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=virtual+pc+for+mac+intel+patch+fix&spell=1

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:35:47 GMT

http://google.com/search?q=vpc+mac&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:36:07 GMT

http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+virtual+pc+change+mac

TrackBack — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:36:18 GMT

an interview with one of our senior managers

go ahead, mac my day — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:20:15 GMT

While I'm linking to stuff, here's a recent interview with Jake, one of our senior managers.