Parallels breathes sigh of relief

While most of the crowd at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address was eager to hear about all of Leopard's new features, Benjamin Rudolph was only interested in one.

Rudolph, who is the head of corporate communications for Parallels, was tuning in to what Steve Jobs would say about the new Leopard operating system's Windows-on-Mac abilities. When the Apple chief finally got around to discussing Boot Camp--the sixth of 10 features he demonstrated--Rudolph was hanging on every word. In the end, Jobs announced little new on that front, saying that the final version of Boot Camp would work just as Apple has been testing it--that is, allowing users to boot into either Windows or the Mac OS, but not support running both operating systems simultaneously. For that, Jobs touted software like Parallels, which uses virtualization technology to allow Windows and Mac software run side by side.L33tdawg: Seeing that Apple already invested a fair amount of time on Bootcamp it didn't seem likely (to me at least) that they would shift their attention to virtualization having already committed to the dual-boot method. That being said, I'm most interested in seeing what VMWare's Fusion has to offer once it goes full release - at the moment Parallels certainly has the upper hand when it comes to running alternative operating systems concurrently with OS X however VMWare has been in the virtualization game far longer than Parallels and I'm keen to see what they're going to come up with. At the end of the day, more options for the consumer is never a bad thing.