“Members of VMware’s ‘Hosted UI’ team — the developers responsible for the virtualization company’s Workstation and Fusion desktop products — were apparently laid off on Monday as part of a restructuring of the company that was announced yesterday,” Sean Gallagher reports for Ars Technica. “The developers were just a part of a larger layoff as the company moved to cut costs and brought aboard a new chief financial officer.”
“In a blog post, Christian Hammond, a former member of the Hosted UI team, reported the layoff, along with concerns about the future of the ‘award winning and profitable’ desktop virtualization products,” Gallagher reports. “‘VMware lost a lot of amazing people, and will be feeling that for some time to come, once they realize what they’ve done,’ Hammond wrote.”
“VMware was acquired by EMC in 2004, which offered 15 percent of VMware’s stock in a 2007 initial public offering. EMC is in the process of being acquired by Dell, which would give Dell a majority stake in VMware,” Gallagher reports. “In other words, blame Michael Dell.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For those stuck having to slum it with Windows on your Mac, what’s your poison: Parallels, Fusion, Boot Camp, VirtualBox, or something else?
SEE ALSO:
Benchmarks: VMware Fusion 8 vs. Fusion 7 vs. Boot Camp – September 1, 2015
Running Windows on your Mac: Parallels Desktop 10 vs. VMWare Fusion 7 – June 4, 2015
IT Enquirer reviews Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac: ‘It’s a lot faster’ – August 22, 2014
Parallels Desktop, not VMware Fusion, is the best virtualization software for most Mac users – January 30, 2013
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Frank” for the heads up.]
Skip windows completely and run CrossOver if it supports the windows program you need to run.
Thanks… Googling it now…
If you can deal with X11 (XQuartz) and MacPorts, the CrossOver updates are eventually free to download, install and use. Not for the feint of heart. The cost of buying CrossOver is put back into the project for future development or the open source project.
Like WINE, CrossOver is considerably limited in what Windows stuff it can run. Be sure to check out if what you want to run is compatible.
A feint is a competititve maneuver, a mock attack. A faint is a loss of consciousness, and a faint heart denotes one predisposed to it; for example, a person easily shocked by indelicacy, or overwhelmed by difficulty. But I quibble.
Except that it’s not about you
‘Herself’ is has the editing skills I have always wished for. I’m hoping ‘Herself’ and I will work together on a writing project some time in the future.
Correction: …FAINT of heart…
If VMware goes belly up. I.E.: the way of Toast Titanium, I suspect several things. One, VMware Fusion isn’t in tbd future of Apple. Maybe we should expect a CPU switch then.
Parallels is still on the table as well as VBox. I use all three. But this announcement is disturbing from the POV that I use the product, every day.
Yes, disturbing. VMware has been in a shaky situation for a couple years. It’s very sad to watch it being messed around and corroded.
As for Toast Titanium: It’s still actively developed by Roxio/Corel. The current version is 14. (They skipped 13). Whether the update from 12 to 14 is worth paying for is another matter. 14 has had a number of bugs and few significant improvements.
Mike Dell’s eyes underwent fusion after a slow merge toward the centre of his face. He probably thought VMware was mocking him and decided to go full SIDAGTMBTTS on them.
I use parallels at work on a 27 inch iMac and 2 Mac mini’s and had not had major issues. It was a bit sensitive a few versions ago, but is rock solid in the latest version.
I had a choice a while back..and now glad I chose parallels.
I use VMware Fusion. But I’m still on version 6 (8 is current version), because I use it only occasionally these days. One of my few remaining uses for it is to play an old favorite game from my Mac OS 9 days, called Alpha Centauri (still fun after all these years). I can’t play my Mac OS 9 version anymore, so I bought the old PC version on eBay for cheap a few years ago. It works great in my Windows XP virtual machine.
If you don’t mind re-buying it, there is an OS X compatible version
http://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri
You can convert VMware images to Parallels. There is a tool to do so. And VMware images are portable from both PC and Mac platforms to Parallels Desktop for Mac.
I tried Parallels but found it didn’t play nice with my tablet. Fusion works much better. I’ve tried VBox but have had a devil of a time installing OS X 10.6 Server off a DVD.
It looks to me like users are becoming less MS dependent. So there is less and less need for products such as this. The rise of the Mac, the assendance of iOS and also Android are causing programs to be written with out an MS preference. Therefore, you no longer need programs such as these to accomplish your goals.
Also that there is less and less reason for people these days to need to run the Windows version of Microsoft Office on their Macs certainly feeds into lower demand for a piece of software whose financial bread-and-butter is Windows-on-OSX. This is because of the existence of cloud services for word processing, spreadsheets and email, and also because the Mac version of Office 2016 finally shares a nearly identical interface with the Windows version for the first time ever.
You say “…the Mac version of Office 2016 finally shares a nearly identical interface with the Windows version for the first time ever?” You must be too young to have suffered through the horror of Word 6, an attempt by Microsoft to make the Mac version of Word look and behave exactly like the Windows version. Many Mac users held their noses in disgust at Word 6, trashed it, and returned to the faster and more Mac-like Word 5.1. It was Word 6 that first changed Mac users minds about Microsoft: that the company no longer made the best applications on the Mac, that it would rather slop out buggy, bloated, slow, ugly software in order to force “Windows” on every desktop.
If Fusion dies go the way of the dodo, it will be sorely missed. It is an extremely stable and reliable piece of virtualization software. I use it to run my bootcamp drive as a virtual machine and also use it for Linux.
I still use Vmware fusion to play some games that weren’t made for mac, like the 90% of games made for the blind, who are still stuck with Windows, mostly because of rehab agencies having their seeing eyes glued to Freedom Scientific’s swaggering bum, FS being a screen reading software for Windows. People know the Mac would be cheaper in the longrun, as voiceover is made directly for it by Apple, Jaws for Windows, Freedom Scientific’s product, costs a good $1099, which is like, twice the cost of a Mac Mini, an up-to-date one at that. Sure, we have NVDA, the free screen reader, but rehab agents don’t see that. They see that they have money to spend, probably some quota to meet. So most blind people are stuck with Windows and its games, granted they aren’t all that engaging, most are simple beat-em-ups and card games and a few shooters, but that’s about it. No Mortal kombat for the blind yet, lol, funny because Mortal kombat is one of the video games we can play. Anyways, I also use the vm for Miranda NG, a multi-protocol messaging client which, to my knowledge, has no equal on the Mac. Adium is dead, and I know of no other that has so many available protocols. I’d rather not use the Facebook site all the time, darn them for dropping XMPP support.
Sent from my iPhone
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I use Parallels, but only for site testing. If I were into games, I’d use it more. I’ve run Parallels and Fusion side-by-side for a review and they came up a tie, but I prefer Parallels.
I use Fusion, but not for Windows. I run OpenBSD for my website and sometimes run older versions of OS X.
VMWare isn’t going anywhere. They may just kill Fusion. VMWare ESXi is the industry standard for hypervisors in data centers everywhere. My guess is that they just don’t want to develop Fusion as it struggles to keep up with OSX and Windows major updates and the features of Parallels. In addition, they need to throw all of their attention to SDN (software defined network) as that’s going to be the next tectonic shift in IT in the next 5 years.
Parallels
Bertrand Serlet is on the Board.
I use virtual box, but not to slum it with windows… I do software dev and vagrant + virtualbox makes life super easy for me.
I use fusion to run windows development on my mac. I find Parallels way to intrusive on my mac.
It is like Parallels tries to merge the two platforms. I do not need that.
I use fusion to avoid buying pc hardware.
If fusion dies I will probably be forced to turn to Parallels. I tried Vbox but found it to difficult to work with and vbox made a mess of upgrading mac os.
The Dell Effect ™