Apples To Apples

I only mentioned Parallels Inc. last week, en passant, while I was discussing Apple's next version of OS X. I never had time to look into what Parallels has, because I only picked up the news about Parallels Workstation software the day I was writing the blog. This week I took a look. What Parallels has is Microsoft's worst nightmare.

Quite simply it is what I expect Apple to provide—the ability to run Windows-in-a-box, a little like the old DOS box that runs in Windows. The main point to note is that when you run it, it looks like OS X is the master OS, and that's not surprising because Windows is running in a virtual machine. If you just see a screen shot of this you quickly get a sense of what it means. If Apple wasn't going to virtualize Windows, just one look at Parallels' capability would change Steve Jobs mind anyway.

Unfortunately for Parallels, Apple will probably provide this capability. What I hadn't appreciated until I saw it with my own eyes is that it completely destroys the Microsoft lock-in. “... and with one bound, the consumer was free”.

This is the point that commentators like John Dvorak (who's been watching the PC market forever and who correctly predicted Apple's move to Intel) and Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group are missing. Both of them have been flamed mercilessly by the Apple devout for suggesting recently that Apple might eventually drop OS X and OEM Windows instead. You'll see icebergs floating down the river Styx before that happens.

It is now possible for Windows to share a screen with OS X. So now, Apples will surely be compared with apples, and the Apples will win. A door stands open on the North wall of the Windows penitentiary. Now you may think that this is a two-way door, but it isn't. Aside from the obvious fact that few people will want to break into prison, this door doesn't swing both ways. Windows users will be able to migrate to Apple easily enough, but it will be difficult for Apple users to move in the other direction. OS X will only be available on Apple. (Apple wont sell OS X on any other hardware any time soon—it makes no business sense). And that puts the boot firmly on the other throat.

Perhaps Microsoft is about to experience its ‘mainframe moment’, like IBM did around 1990.

You may think I'm being a bit ‘previous’ here, and I am. But Parallels doesn't just provide a capability for OS X, it also provides the same capability for other PCs. You can virtualize Linux from Windows. You can virtualize different versions of Windows. What is happening here is that the PC operating system is being reduced to a GUI.

So may the best GUI win.

Firefox evicting Explorer

Just for fun I went to visit BoingBoing to see how the browser stats are moving. The last time I looked at the browser figures (10 months ago) they showed 38% of visitors to BoingBoing as being Firefox users, 34.9% Internet Explorer users and 10% Safari users. This time Firefox's dominance was unarguable:

• Firefox 46.1% (up 8.1%)
• Internet Explorer 27.9% (down 7%)
• Safari 13.5%. (up 3.5%)

Does this mean that Firefox is now truly dominant? Not really.

If you go to w3schools, another site that is happy to publish its browser figures, it tells another tale:

• Firefox 24.5% (up 3.5% in 10 months)
• Internet Explorer 64.7% (fell 6.9% in 10 months)
• Safari below 6% (?)

(The Safari figures are not broken out).

A phenomenon here is that such figures seem to overstate the actual Firefox market share when compared with figures from market research companies (which I have to assume are more accurate—although I'm not convinced). Such stats currently suggest that Firefox has just above 10% of the market with suggestions that the figure is closer to 20% in Europe, where Firefox is known to have greater traction.

There is an interesting conundrum here as to what market share really means. Since both products are given away there is a credible argument that market share should be measured by usage rather than by which browser is loaded on the PC.

New Firefox users, after all, have to go through the process of downloading the software. Because that's a chore, they only do it when kissed off with their current browser, not necessarily when they get a new PC. At that point their allegiance to IE isn't necessarily tested.

There's no denying that Firefox's success is about quality. After a while of trying out Safari, when I moved to using Apple, I downloaded Firefox. It wasn't that Safari was bad, just that Firefox is better. It yields higher productivity.

So when is Google going to buy Firefox?

AVID: Anti-Virus Is Dead

Following a conference call with a significant IT security vendor this week, I have decided to make AVID (Anti-Virus Is Dead) a semi-regular item in this blog. In AVID I will chart the gradual demise of signature-based anti-virus technology as it is superseded—as it inevitably will be—by technology that actually does the job. So AVID will continue to appear until some IT security expert convinces me that AV technology has a legitimate role in the computer world or hell freezes over.

The conference call, by the way, was subject to non-disclosure, so I can't report on its content in any detail. As the company (a significant vendor in the IT security market) had contacted me because of my previous blog posting about AV, I had expected to be faced with a strongly dissenting opinion. Not so. Following a frank conversation, the company's security expert and I ended up vigorously agreeing on most points of the argument. I also discovered that this vendor will (at some point) be launching a product that I may be able to add to the list of products from Bit9, Securewave and AppSense that do the AV job properly—and then some. If the company wants to call this product AVID, it has my blessing.

I am tempted to invoke the well-worn cliché and declare that the AV emperor has no clothes. However that would be unfair. The AV emperor is not entirely naked. Clothes he surely has, but unfortunately they do not entirely preserve his modesty. Indeed, from where I'm standing his privates are embarrassingly visible—and I'm not talking about the guys in uniform that are marching in front of him.