Yah. But what I need is time for the software vendor to publish the Win7 version of their software.
That's really the main benefit of the virtualizer -- to buy time while third-party vendors update their software. It's something I think should have been done with Vista. Both the hardware and software capabilities certainly existed. Virtual machines were nothing new. Even hobbyist-level Linux users who needed Windows for various apps routinely used VirtualBox (among other VMs) to install Windows on Linux.
I remember being at my buddy Keith's shop (he's a Microsoft Gold Partner, Grand Poobah, or some such thing) when Vista came out. One of his clients had (against Keith's advice) gone ahead and bought a bunch of Vista machines, and Keith was struggling to make some proprietary app work on one of them. In the meantime, a 14-year-old kid name Matt who worked for him had installed Ubuntu on another one of the machines and was successfully running both XP
and Vista in VirtualBox on top of Ubuntu.
I don't know whether they actually implemented that solution, but I do remember that it started an interesting discussion about how Microsoft's bowing at the altar of Backward Compatibility was really causing the OS to become a total mess. If Matt could run set up Windows on Virtual Box on Ubuntu in less than two hours, Why couldn't Microsoft build a decent, clean OS and run legacy Windows on top of it? That, it seems, is what MS has done with XP Mode on 7.
One of my criticisms of MS in regard to XP Mode, however, is that although it's possible to import an intact XP machine into the Win7 VM (MS even hints at it here and there), the process is probably a bit too much for average users, and MS doesn't really support it. Because a lot of business users are in the same situation as Dr. Bruce, I think MS should come out with a tool to automate the process of importing an intact XP system onto the VM on 7. There would still be issues with licensing on third-party apps, but this is also true when reinstalling the apps on a fresh Virtual XP.
I suspect that someone (probably Mark Russinovich) is working on such a tool as we speak, and will eventually sell it to MS. He's already figured out how to do it, and his way works. Now all he has to do is make the process idiot-proof. Such a tool couldn't help but speed acceptance of Win7 by business users.
-Rich
. That knowledge was worth it.
