I got an interesting call toward the end of the week. Apparently, a new VMware (NYSE: VMW) application called "VMware Fusion 3.0" was having huge problems. The product wasn't failing; it was having download problems. Evidently, so many people were trying to download and install the product, the demand was crashing VMware's servers.
Now, VMware is no small fly-by-night company. It's the pioneer of virtualized products, and it is led by a CEO who cut his teeth at Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). That means its servers are clearly enterprise class, and they perform in areas that were once dominated by mainframes -- which means these servers are about as robust as you can get. Yet the load on these servers from people desperate to get this new product was such it was bringing them to their knees.
You'd likely conclude, as I did, that this product must be hugely popular and evidently it is -- but what, you ask, does this have to do with Mac users and Windows? Fusion from VMware is designed to allow people to run Windows on Macs.
This makes some sense, as a lot of people moved to the Mac over the last two years because they were frustrated with Windows, but it's likely they still have vastly more experience with the Windows platform. It was always believed -- at least, by me -- that some of them might come back. A lot of us struggled with the reality that folks don't buy hardware that often, and given how expensive a new Mac is, most would choose to tough it out rather than experience a quick swap.
Well, we forgot about products like Fusion, which allow you to run Windows on a Mac -- but these users apparently didn't. Boy, when a Windows product is hot enough to get Mac users -- even recent ones -- to install Windows on their Macs, that is a big deal. We don't yet know how this is working out, but you can sense their hope that Windows 7 is all that it has been said to be. We'll hope, for their sake, that it continues to be.
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