VMware Fusion is now generally available. I’ll update this post with links to blogs and other quotes from the Fusion team as they come out.
Srinivas Krishnamurti on the Fusion release with some more background on packaging. Link: Elvis has left the building
While not quite Apple-esque, we felt that this was a clean look and
conveyed the essence of our product. We all felt that black background
was more appealing than other colors we considered. Perhaps the
coolest and most unique part of this design is the front flaps that open in
the middle on the front. After spending an entire Sunday afternoon at
Best Buy, I realized most software boxes either have no flaps at all or
have a flap that opens like a book. Boooring! We didn’t want to be
just another box. We wanted to be proud of the box, just like we
wanted to be proud of the software we have built. The VMware Fusion box has
two front flaps that open down the middle – think of the monitor opening up
down the middle. Each of the flaps has three screenshots showcasing
the product while the middle of the box (once you open the flaps) has
detailed description of the product.
Later: Regis Duchesne talks a bit about the beginnings of the project:
In January 2006, I started porting the VMware hosted virtualization
engine to Mac OS X by myself. I had never touched an Apple computer
before.A year and a half later, we have built a world-class
team of Mac engineers, and on behalf of the team I’m happy to announce
the general availability of VMware Fusion 1.0.
Later II: Ben Gertzfield is really excited as well:
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.
Later III: Shawn Morel on how the new UI was designed to be Mac-like:
I was the first UI developer to start working on what became Fusion
along with a few senior devs hacking away on porting the virtualization
platform and more devs joining us later in the effort to bring this
product to market.… We wanted to
emphasize was that Fusion is not just a straight Workstation port. We
re-designed (rather than re-wrote) from the ground up to meet the needs
of Mac consumers. There was a lot that was written in a cross platform
way that we were able to leverage. We could have even taken large parts
of the GTK UI from Workstation on Linux and run that under X11 on OS X.
We don’t think that would have been the optimal solution for our
customers – we strongly believe that this is a different market
segment. This was also a great opportunity to take a great product like
Workstation and learn from the evolution it’s undergone over the years
and start fresh; cut off some of the cruft, simplify and refine the
user experience.
