Quote

Mr. Wolf revealed that Apple vice-president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller told him that the company would "absolutely not" include virtualization similar to Parallels in the next version of Mac OS X. "The R&D would be prohibitive and we're not going to do it. Our solution is dual boot," Mr. Schiller told the analyst.

back in analyst.

Maybe the "switch" will initally just be consumers (sales numbers sound encouraging already), but in the long term, we will probably see this prediction is false as us measly users do have ways of influencing corporate purchasing, especially as we move up into the higher realms of companies.

Typically, the analysts are behind the times and out of touch with reality.

Virtualization software is already here and most large companies have some sort of corporate licensing deal for Windows.

If corporations don't buy Macs it won't be because they cost too much or they have to buy a copy of Windows for it. It will be because there is an entire generation of IT staff who lost their virginity to Windows and know little if anything else. It will take another generation to replace that way of thinking.

Ask this question again in ten or fifteen years.

I know a ton of people who use mac at home and a pc at work, these are going to be the people who "start the revolution". Eventually it will become commonplace, especially after they work in virtulization or whatever.

do large corporations pay list price for Windows? Most (read all, most likely) have enterprise licenses for Windows (hence no license key issue). That is exactly what I installed in my copy of Parallels.

There are other reasons why corporations won't buy Macs to run Windows (at this time), but that certainly isn't one of them.

At least two of our major clients have ditched desktop PCs for most of their staff already, in favour of various 'thin client' machines (some using Windows CE, others using server-side virtualisation). They're also pushing for browser based applications, even when it's cheaper/easier to develop desktop ones. Not sure why, when they then insist that it only need to work / test against IE - why not just develop a VB app then?

The point is that the trend in big business is away from 'personal' computers back to terminals. It is just that the terminals run Windows these days, and I don't see that changing.

If they're really going to ditch Windows, it will be for Novell's SUSE Linux, which is trying to hit Microsoft on the other side from Apple, by marketing an OS aimed wholly at business users.
That used to be Microsoft's strong point, but it is very difficult for them to be all things to all people, and the likes of IBM have made a strong comeback by talking to business rather than the consumer.
Apple have gone the other way - they're focusing on the consumer, even if that might hurt them in the scientific computing markets they inherited from Next.

Everything goes in cycles. In the early 90s, I worked for a publishing company that used thin clients attached to a main server. The employees weren't happy.

After I had left, I found out they moved to PCs...for a while. They also had to bring in an IT staff to manage everything.

Years later. They have moved to Macs.

So much for the IT staff, huh? Can't see them moving back to Thin clients though. What a HUGE retrograde that would be.