A commenter raised an interesting point: Amidst all this fuss about Boot Camp, Parallels and Q/QEMU, solutions that run Windows on Intel-based Macs, there has been relatively little discussion about why someone would want to run Windows on a Mac.There are lots of reasons. But first, an aside to commenters who chide me for failing to mention other OSes. Linux, *BSD and others run natively on PowerPC Macs, and before too long, they won’t need help from a virtualization solution or Boot Camp. Windows is a special case. Open source OSes are flexible and modifiable enough to adapt to different flavors of host systems; Windows is not.Now, let’s get back to addressing the need to run Windows on a Mac. Necessity requires some of us to have Windows with us wherever we are. I have to carry two notebooks with me when I travel, because my life and work are on my PowerBook, and often, some portion of the new technology I’m researching is on the other. For example, there isn’t yet an OS X edition of Visual Studio Team System that I know of. Among the many roles I take on as a technologist, one is that of a cross-platform admin. My lab is a 24/7 heterogeneous IT shop. I could use VNC and ssh to manage everything, but if I’m doing Windows admin chores, I’d rather run the more responsive Microsoft Management Console, which gives me the ability to see multiple machines and use less bandwidth. If I’m working on my Macs, I prefer Remote Desktop and the Server Admin and RAID Admin GUIs for the same reasons.Developers targeting multiple platforms or coding in dynamic languages need to validate against multiple OSes. Multi-booting and virtualization have advantages and disadvantages (see the next post), but they’re a good deal more sensible than surrounding yourself with consoles.If you work in a predominantly PC shop, there’s no way you can sell your bosses on buying you a Mac unless you promise them that you can, and will, run all of the company’s blessed Windows software. You can engage your boss in a point-by-point debate on the virtues of buying you Office for Mac instead of installing from your company’s volume license of Windows Office. You can explain why your version of Entourage can’t run the client-side support for some 3rd-party plug-in added to Exchange. But it’s smarter to knuckle down and work with what you’re given while you find Mac ways to do them, and use OS X to do those things that make people ask, “how’d you do that?” You want to be able to fire up Windows quickly when some smartass, Windows-blinded superior asks you to do something he knows you can’t do on a Mac, like play an encrypted WMV or unpack a self-extracting EXE.And finally, there is the simple and often unacknowledged reality that users have libraries of commercial Windows apps and collections of PC peripherals that they can’t afford to replace with Mac equivalents. For example, I’ve got several USB devices for which OS X lacks drivers. I have one USB video digitizer of very good quality that would cost about $300 to replace with a Mac equivalent. Previously, I had to digitize to a PC and copy the file to my Mac. Now it just works. I’ve got a low-end TV tuner/video capture pigtail that isn’t great quality, but is very handy, and a 10/100 Ethernet that the Mac can’t identify but for which Windows has built-in drivers.Am I speaking in broad defense of Windows? I hope you know better. I celebrate choice of all kinds when it isn’t choice for the sake of choice, and when it’s packaged in a way that doesn’t harm productivity. Boot Camp and virtualization make Windows nearly painless, beta glitches aside. Every Mac user knows it’s easy to live without Windows. But if you have an open mind, it’s even easier to live, or to make a living, when you have the freedom to run Windows (or whatever) when you need to. Software Development