At the same time of Workstation 6 beta public launch, VMware opens up beta program enrollment for its first virtualization product on the Apple Mac OS: codename Fusion.
Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development at VMware, announced public beta on the corporate blog, The Console, underlining features in current build (36932):
- Native Cocoa UI
- Virtual Battery (physical notebook battery indicator inside VMs)
- Other VMware products interoperability (independently on host OS)
Enroll for the beta here.
VMware surely is the most popular virtualization company worldwide but currently exposed features seem not enough to downsize huge success retrieved so far by the young competitor Parallels, which has been endorsed by Apple itself and which is pretty fast in releasing new builds with new notable capabilities (like Coherence).
Exactly like happened to Microsoft, VMware delay in readying a product for Apple customers as soon as Mac OS has been released for x86 architectures, could cost company serious difficulties in gaining back trust of Mac community.
More problems may raise at RTM launch time, depending on marketing strategy: if nothing free will be provided customers may start wondering why VMware offers free Player (and Server) on Windows and Linux while they have to pay on Mac OS.