After upgrading to Leopard by doing clean reinstalls on all of my boxes, I wanted to get Parallels back up and running. To my surprise, the Parallels installer doesn’t seem to want to install Parallels. At about 2% of the installation it freezes up. In discussing this with a friend, a suggestion of VMWare Fusion was made and I decide to give it a try. VMWare Fusion installed great, and seems to start ok, but alas, when I went to go convert my Parallels disk image, I found that there was no native functionality in VMWare Fusion to do this.
After some brief googling, I found that VMWare has a Parallels converter application. I merrily went on my way to download it, realizing I’d probably have to reactivate windows and such. It was when I got to the download page that it struck me. The VMWare application to convert one OS X based virtualization image format to their own... was windows based. Yup, to convert a Parallels image to VMWare Fusion image, you have to run a windows based conversion tool. Now I ask you: if you’re looking to steal users away from a competing product, doesn’t it make sense to make the tools which make it possible to do so, in the native operating system your competing product runs in?
