Those of us who were remember playing with a product from SCO called "Merge" back in the late 90s will remember its ability to run Microsoft Windows in a virtual machine environment and display application windows in the same layer as Xwindows.  This was really cool at the time though the hardware performance limitations of the day meant that it was not a particulalrly viable option for most people (umm actually the price of Merge made it pretty unattaractive too!).

Well, others have done similar things over the years (eg Crossover X's wine implmentation in the Linux environment) but until now all such efforts have been marginal.  Readers will know by now that I'm a fan of Parallels , a virtualisation environment for Mac OS X.  The latest version of Parallels was released the other day and aside from the all round speed andreliability offered in previous versions, they now have a feature called "Coherence" which effectively removes the Windows desktop and leaves your Windows application windows running at apparently the same layer as your Mac windows.  Ok, they cheat a little by having the taskbar appear at the bottom of the screen when any Windows app has focus (I gues you have it auto hide though be warned... better auto hide it on a different edge to the Mac OS X dock!).  Windows apps also now have Icons appear in the dock and also in the task list so its a breeze to swicth between individual Mac and Windows apps.

In any case, this is a really cool feature and takes us one step closer to the  nirvana of the OS being irrelevant.  (OK.. thats an argument starter so take it with a grain of salt).  The issue here is that whereas when I first considered migrating from Windows to Mac, I was put off by the prospect of not having access to certain critical (whether I like it or not!) applications under Mac OS, now its simply not an issue.  Mac OS X and windows are running side by side harmoniously and its gets better with every release of Parallels.

All this reminds me of a blog entry I read recently (which I can't remember where otherwise I'd link it for you) that highlighted Redmond's latest attempt to put the brakes on the migration away from Windows.  The EULA for the "lesser" versions of the Windows Vista OS expressly forbids the use of those versions of Vista in a virtualisation environment.  By contrast, the use of the Ultimate & Enterprise versions in Virtualisation environments is actively encouraged.  Why?  Well I think its pretty obvious.  Microsoft has correctly identfied that the greatest threat to their corporate monopoly is not corporate sites going to a different OS (be it Linux or Mac)... sure some have done this but its drop in the ocean stuff for now... their biggest fear is individual users... home users... SOHOs etc marching en-mass in another direction.  This would set the stage for the ultimate migration away from MS by corporates and Government.  Most individual end users will use the "lesser" versions of Vista and by prohibiting them from running it under Parallels on the Mac, they are attempting to lock those users into Windows.

Its too late for people like me... I only need a few old legacy Windows apps now... so I have no need to upgrade to Vista... hang, I'm running my Windows apps under Win2K under Parallels.

Just my 2c worth!