VMware Fusion Helps Save iPhone 3G Launch in UK? Wow.
When I woke up this morning, as is my usual move, I went to check the VMware Fusion twitter account (“follow” us to stay in the loop!) to see what showed up overnight.
Imagine my surprise when seeing a flurry of tweets about VMware Fusion being rapidly deployed at Apple stores in the UK, to help activate iPhones via O2 (the cell carrier partnering with Apple in the UK) website.
It seems that the O2 website is Internet Explorer-only, which means you need to run Windows—Internet Explorer doesn’t run on the Mac.
But as you would expect, Apple only has Macs in their stores, meaning they’d have to run Windows on their Macs to get access to Internet Explorer…and Apple’s solution of choice to do this looks to be VMware Fusion.
Since that flurry of tweets, TUAW, Computerworld, The Daily Standard, and a handful of other outlets have picked it up.
Not being over in the UK, it’s hard to know how much Internet Explorer is helping, versus the problem being at the web services level—these things can be messy, to say the least.
Regardless, I know when I speak for the whole Fusion team when I say it feels nice to know that VMware Fusion is Apple’s preferred choice when it comes to running Windows on Mac.
It's great that Apple found a quick solution in VMware Fusion (although from the reports coming along now it may not be a complete one), but for the record there are other ways to run IE on the Mac in a hurry.
The simplest one is IE4OSX, http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/ -- it's a bundle of the Darwine binaries of WINE and the IE app.
Posted by: Michael T. Rose | July 11, 2008 at 09:55 AM
As we do not actually know the reason behind the choice. It does not really proof anything. Probably VMware was top of mind by the one who created the solution. But any way it confirms my expectations that VMware is much more eager to become the number one than Parallels. That's my reason to choose for VMware.
Posted by: Joost | July 18, 2008 at 05:12 AM