When will a new PRODUCTION release happen?

Agreed. People need to back off the Parallels team when it comes to delivering a GA. I know everyone is excited to get a GA but you need to give them the time to finish. The builds they have producing have too many issues. I think declaring GA without fixing all of the issues would be a critical mistake.

 

Priorities?

So, how would people react if Parallels said something like:
"OK, some of the new features in the beta are really cool but they raise a lot of issues. We're going to pull them for the moment and concentrate on the basics"

My suspicion is that there would be a complete lack of agreement on which were the "basics" and which were the "cool but non-essential" features. Personally, I think that boot camp support - while an incredibly attractive feature - is such a can of worms (you are "virtually" yanking the system disc out of one machine and plugging it into another every time you switch) that it was a mistake to open it.

Plus, Parallels have to be ready for VMWare. My current impression from the reviews is that the "production" Parallels vs. Fusion Beta is win-some-lose-some but that Parallels RC3 blows it out of the water and is closer to completion.

As for "when will it support my phone/PDA" - my experience is that phone/PDA syncing is pretty flakey even on a "real" Windows PC. I take it that people are aware of "The Missing Sync" (http://www.markspace.com/) - which syncs Windows Moble and PalmOS devices with the Mac (my experience - no more flakey, and much more friendly, than using windows).

 

The problem with pulling features from a product during the last stage of the close-down is you never know all of the interdependencies that could be effected. I think if Parallels started pulling features they'd open up a whole can of worms. They could make the product worse then it currently is.

I'd prefer them to focus on fixing important issues. They've jumped through hoops to try to make the BlackBerry and XYZ cellphones work when Parallels was trapping for many users. Supporting every cellphone and GPS known to man isn't more important them stability and performance.

 

Actually, I'm not sure that is true. The "killer app" for virtualization is that one lingering bit of hardware or software that doesn't work under OSX - and that you don't want to have to re-boot (and sacrifice a big chunk of your hard drive) to use - or quickly making sure that a minor stylesheet change hasn't broken your website under IE6 (clue: yes!) - for which purpose 24/7/365 uptime and super-slick performance in Office 2007 is not necessarily a priority. Personally, I find that I rarely need Windows working for more than 15-20 minutes at a time.

One presumes that you bought a Mac because your preferred work environment was OSX. If you are regularly doing day-to-day production work using mainstream windows software (and/or just wanted a PC in a designer case) then you might be better off using BootCamp and enjoying graphics-accelerated dual-or-quad-core goodness. Virtualization will always have some performance/compatibility penalties over dual booting.

I'm not saying that there are not good reasons for doing serious/sustained work in a VM - virtual appliances, server development, sandboxing for example - just that they are certainly not the only (and probably not the main) market for the product.

The bad news for Parallels is that each potential customer may have their own personal "killer app" preventing them from wiping Microsoft off their shoes for good.

 

[

It is important to be clear and not emotional about what is being said. Simply it is for the team to take the time to fix and render the product stable in relation to the features that are being promoted by the company. The priorities of what features were to be in the next GA release of the product were decided by the company and no one else (but no doubt based on many considerations).

The team has done a wonderful job for such a complex piece of software and I have great respect for what they have achieved.

However, we are now at the so call "release candidate" stage and there is a critical opportunity to focus on getting it right and releasing a solid product rather than being pressured into an early release of a still buggy / not fully QA version which certainly won't engender longer term loyal support. There is a limit as to how long those that value their time and data highly will continue to support a product if on-going "production" (GA) releases continue to have potential data corruption or stability issues, if there are alternative choices.

Chris

 

RC3 just works for me

While I did have some hickups to get RC3 to work with Windows XP (because of installing over an older release) - for me it just works. I can run copy protected CD's, I can play movies, I can develop programs for microcontrollers in an IDE that is only available for Windows, and I can even debug the microcontroller over the USB interface. It saved me buying a cheap Windows box for that purpose, I do not have to reboot, I can access data on my Mac partition etc.

Considering the many bugs of Windows XP I find this quite a feat. Obviously I am happy if remaining bugs (I did not meet any) are ironed out, but RC3 is arguably better than the first release of an operating system by Microsoft.

Just continue your work, and I am a happy customer.

 

Yup - and hopefully one of those considerations was "the last 10% of the job takes 90% of the time" - particularly sorting out that noisy minority of users for whom RC3 is not proving stable.

My impression is that I'm being offered a hell of a lot of extras over and above what was promised to me when I bought my copy (for a very reasonable price) last summer, and would happily pay another 50 bucks for (say) Coherence (which is the coolest hack I've seen in a long time).

However, since then, the way the new features have been advertised means that they're pretty much committed to putting them in a free upgrade (and partly undemined the validity of their "beta software" disclaimer). They've also given themselves a massive support/customer relations headache by releasing features in "public betas" when they were pretty clearly "alpha" (e.g. the first version of Boot Camp support that was only ever going to work with an all-defaults bootcamp setup and an activation-free copy of windows; the drag-and-drop feature which silently made your Mac hard drive writable by windows...).

So, yes, kudos for Parallels for offering a great product at a great price then throwing in a lot of neat extra features - and making enough progress to dispel any rumours that they might be vapourware - but next time, maybe one less can of Jolt before the product planning meeting?

 

Seems like this evoked a lot of emotion, and that not all of us agree. Clearly many want to cut Parallels some slack, but in my opinion they are creating their own problems! I was a manager of large software / hardware development projects for 20+ years. My observation on this project is that it will NEVER be done because of the way they are working. They are coding towards a moving target that will never be in focus because they have not constrained their project! Clearly they have no requirements document and they are adding things on the fly. Of course with this method they will create problems. The VIsta issue is a perfect example. Looks like they decided to include Vista in the scope of the project after they had already begun. And as has been said by many Vista, will not be stable enough to include until at least one if not two service pack releases. That will likely take 18 months. Another example of the poor development environment is that they do clearly have not developed or run test scripts. All of this comes back to a poorly structured development environment and poor project management. They should put a stake in the sand as to what they want to release, bundle it, code, test it, and move on. Vista should be in the next release not this one.

Patrick Toomey
Victor, Montana