Windows Updates on Mac OS X - Not a Microsoft Win, but the Triumph of Virtualization

This is both a sight for sour eyes and one of the best desktop views you will ever be able to access. A Windows Updates notification on Mac OS X tiger. Of course that the emphasis is immediately placed on the fact that Windows has successfully conquered the Mac OS X desktop. And with the support of virtualization, all roads lead to Microsoft's platform. Apple can only benefit from this move. The Cupertino-based company only recently upgraded its Boot Camp Public Beta to version 1.4, making another step toward Windows and especially Vista. However, the adjacent image, courtesy of Long Zheng is an illustration of VMWare Fusion in action and not Boot Camp.

But the true story behind this screenshot is not the irony of Windows Updates serving security patches to Windows Vista or Windows XP, it is the fact that virtualization is breaking boundaries and makes every solution platform agnostic. "The virtualization industry is moving into the limelight. And while the market is still nascent, with only about 5 percent of servers virtualized today, the technology is poised for strong growth, creating great opportunities for customers and partners," stated Larry Orecklin, general manager at Microsoft focused on the System Center family of management products and Virtualization. "The virtualization market is emerging and therefore very dynamic with significant opportunities to reduce costs and complexity across the IT infrastructure; from the desktop to the datacenter."

Virtualization is much more than just a simple virtual machine running Windows on a Mac computer. It is a technology that will permit to break the intimate connection between the operating system and the hardware, between the user interface and the computer, between the applications and the underlying platform. Windows running on top of Mac OS X is not a victory for Microsoft, it's a win for virtualization and just a step to what generalized practices will become in the future.

"For instance, the OS can be decoupled from the physical hardware it runs on using hardware virtualization (including server and desktop virtualization), while application virtualization allows an analogous decoupling between the OS and the applications that use it. Similarly, presentation virtualization allows separating an application's user interface from the physical machine the application runs on. This makes it possible to run an application in one location but have it be controlled in another," Microsoft added.