VMware Fusion is Quite Remarkable

Ever felt like you've just run a marathon—for the past year and change?  I'm breathless and panting, but I've got a grin on my face a mile wide, because my team and I just crossed the finish line.  VMware Fusion 1.0 is really real, and seeing my baby run on perfect strangers' Mac laptops in cafés is the most rewarding experience of my life.

For those just tuning in, Fusion is VMware's first product for the Mac; it lets Windows and Mac OS run at the same time.  I'm pretty sure virtualization on the Mac is going be as groundshaking as the original Linux release of VMware Workstation way back in 1999.  Check out this money quote from a ZDNet article about Workstation 1.0 from March of 1999 (emphasis mine and misspelling of VMware theirs):

VMWare, which shipped a test version of the product last week, expects it will eventually work with IBM Corp.'s OS/2 operating system, Solaris from Sun Microsystems and software from start-up Be Inc. (It won't support Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh system, unless Apple rewrites its software to run on Intel chips.)

"VMWare is quite remarkable," said Jean-Louis Gassee, Be's founder. "They are really clever guys."

Too awesome for words.  Who would have thought that OS/2 and BeOS would be mentioned before the Mac, just 8 years ago?  And now it's all come full circle; instead of Warp, the Media OS, and PowerPC, now it's Leopard, Digital Lifestyles, and quad-core Intel processors.

These days, Macs are showing up all over the place; I see coders, sysadmins, and creative types alike hacking away on their Apple laptops at conferences, coffee shops, and at airports.  Basically, anyone who wants working with computers to be plain old fun again has switched to Mac—more and more, it's pretty clear that the creative movers and shakers that drove the Linux community into the open-source tour de force it became in the 1990s are now using Apple hardware to found another revolution.

Fusion's a part of that revolution.  For the first time in my life, I use my own software every day.  And I love it.  Pretty much everyone I know who's played with it has told me how it's become a part of their everyday life; as a software developer, those are the best words you could possibly hear.

What was really cool about creating Fusion was that the idea and implementation was completely driven by engineers from day one, and that VMware gave us humble coders the power to take it from proof-of-concept all the way to the svelte black box soon to be on the shelves at the Apple Store.  Most companies treat software developers like Lego bricks: identical, fungible commodities to be placed wherever the product requirements demand them to be.  But at VMware, engineers are given full leeway to design things right the first time, and that totally rules.

We had the rock-solid infrastructure in place to let us focus on distilling the complexity and power of VMware's virtualization engine down to a simple, native Cocoa user interface.  Instead of quickly porting Workstation or Player, we chose to focus on a totally new market: the consumer.

We knew that Macs, cool as they are, still needed to run Windows apps.  But who wants to reboot all the time?  Instead, we embarked on a design course that took us from a simple technology demo at WWDC 2006 (exactly a year ago!) all the way to the streamlined, intuitive Fusion interface… and we had to break a lot of ground along the way.

For pretty much every new feature in Fusion like Unity (letting Windows apps run side-by-side with Mac apps), 3D (up to DirectX 8.1), and Windows Easy Install (just type in your username, password, and product key, and Fusion automatically installs Windows for you), we engineered it the right way to make it possible for other VMware software to use in the future.  It definitely takes longer to bake in that much quality, but the end result is well worth it.