Saturday, January 14,2006 @ 2:40pm
MS working with Apple on future of VPC
Following this week's five-year commitment to the Mac platform, Microsoft said it is working with Apple to bring Virtual PC to the new Intel-architecture, although it didn't provide details about the release date. The company, however, said that it would not run under Rosetta, Apple's emulation environment that allows older PowerPC programs to run on Intel-based Macs. The company said that it would wait on receipt of the new shipping machines to better evaluate Virtual PC for Intel-Macs as well the final release date of Mac Office and Messenger for Intel-Macs; however, the company this week said it has dropped all development of Windows Media Player for the Mac.
"Virtual PC 7 remains the top emulation software for Mac PowerPC users. However, applications like Virtual PC that are highly dependent on the OS will not run under Rosetta," said Roz Ho, General Manager of Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) at Microsoft.
"These types of products require a dedicated team and a lot of work to rebuild them for an entirely new architecture. That said, we know that using Windows-based applications on Macs is important to our customers, and we’re working with Apple to figure out the best way to bring this technology to Intel-based Macs. We’ll have a better idea once we have the new machines and can accurately evaluate just what is required to transition the product."
The company also said that the Universal Binary transition may affect the timing of the next release of Mac Office and Mac Messenger. Although it plans to deliver Entourage and Messenger updates in March, these will not be native Intel applications.
"We typically deliver new versions every two to three years, as this timeframe is when the majority of customers are ready for new productivity software. Moving to universal binaries will naturally impact our schedule, but we’re dedicated to bringing Office for Mac and Messenger for Mac to customers and making sure we deliver the highest quality products. We’ll know just how much the schedule will need to shift as soon as we’re able to fully test our current and forthcoming solutions on Intel-based Macs."
Ho said that the Mac BU will focus on file format compatibility--the primary conern of its users--by bringing new XML file formats, and improved layout engines and graphics and will work with Apple to identify new technologies that will benefit its customers.