Parallels was the first to announce to the Mac market that it had a desktop virtualization product for the new Apple Mac OS X (on Intel technology).  The press quickly responded with Apple's announcement about Boot Camp (a dual boot solution) - Apple's solution to allowing the new Intel Mac to boot a Windows operating system.

Many of us have tried dual booting our desktop machines.  But is it really an option in today's computing world?  If I am using a Mac, do I really want to reboot my machine JUST to use a Windows product?  Or with the huge surge in virtualization products, wouldn't I rather just switch over, live, into another environment to perform whatever task it is that I wanted to perform?

Enter Parallels Workstation 2.1 for Mac.  It allows me to switch over from my Mac OS X environment quickly into FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, MS-DOS, or some other distribution of Linux or Windows operating system.

But is first to market a guarantee?  Maybe not.  A VMware employee who runs run-virtual.com posts that VMware is already running internally its own virtualization product on the new Mac.  What version of product is still unknown to me, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the functionality of VMware Workstation in this product.  So, soon to enter the space - VMware?  And let's not forget, Microsoft has a Virtual PC product for the old PowerPC Mac.  Are they too going to come out with a new version of their product to run inside of Mac OS X? 

For an opinion on how well Parallels works on a Mac, check out this article on Hexus Lifestyle.