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Apple and Microsoft will collaborate on VirtualPC under their new 5-year agreement, MacNN reports. Microsoft will reportedly port VPC to the Intel architecture, as the current version will not work under Rosetta on the latest Macs. In addition, the Intel switch has forced MS to revise its delivery schedules on the next version of Mac Office and MSN Messenger. Roz Ho, General Manager of Mac BU, noted that MS would deliver Entourage and Messenger updates in March which will allow them to run on Rosetta, but these would not be native Intel applications. Analysis: Although Apple has said 'we won't help' people run Windows on Intel Macs, or support Windows on Mac, Intel Macs, for the initiated, will ultimately kill MS's expensive investment in Connectix, as savvy users will run Windows natively on Intel-based Macintoshes. It's also a part of the costly Office Pro. There may well be an interim Rosetta/VPC solution so as not to annoy customers who bought VPC for their G4s/G5s, but we think it's RIP VPC, ultimately. And, while we're on this, has Redmond forgotten how to write code for Intel? Admittedly, we're talking OS X here, but the calls to the Intel CPU must cut the coding/porting time for MacBU programmers to write Office and other apps for Mac-on-Intel. As ever, it's a third-rate effort from Microsoft. If those guys actually had any interest competing on the Mac platform (the word 'competition' probably doesn't exist in Encarta), they'd still be developing Explorer and WiMP, irrespective of the existence of Safari and QuickTime. Fact is, the Apple-MS agreements only exist (i) to sell Office Mac; and (ii) to get Apple to give MS a sneak preview of OS X technology so they can plagiarize it on the Windows platform. In case anyone's forgotten, MS couldn't resist stealing a few lines of code from QuickTime in the mid-1990s, when it was just starting to code its half-baked multimedia efforts for Wintel.
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