Google Partners With Parallels To Bring Windows Apps To Chrome OS

For years, Parallels has provided virtualization software so you could run full Windows installs on a Mac, but today they're tackling a new OS. From a report: The company just announced that it is partnering with Google to work on bringing full Windows application support to Chrome OS enterprise devices. That's a big deal for the many businesses out there that run various pieces of legacy Windows software -- or just any business that wants to run Microsoft's Office software natively. It could Chrome OS devices a lot more viable in a variety of workspaces that may have previously had to rely on Windows hardware, though of course that'll depend on how well it is implemented. How exactly this will work remains to be seen; Parallels only said that partnership would "seamlessly add full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, to Chromebook Enterprise devices."

office 365

[bugs2squash]

seems to me that office and other "killer" windows apps are moving away from dependence on windows itself. The latest version of excel and outlook even look like they were written with swing and displayed on X without the benefit of a window manager

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[lessSockMorePuppet]

Have you stopped beating your now-dead wife?

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[tlhIngan]

Of course. Office365 is a service. Microsoft would be stupid to tie a service to a product you must have, which is why they make O365 available to every platform - it's in their interest that subscribers pay for service and use whatever OS they want.

Likewise, they're free to tie the subscription free version to Windows.

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[bn-7bc]

well as long as the apps are writen in -net core+ mono (for the gui stuff) it shuld be a simple matter of a recomile atrgeting linux, or am I missing something?

Windows end of life?

[BringsApples]

Maybe Windows end of life is near, and they're wanting their software to still be marketable. They've certainly been screwing the pooch lately with their OS updates.

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[s4080326]

It appears that they are conceding any version of windows mobile is doomed and are embracing Android as the most Microsoft friendly Mobile OS. They will be less friendly with this move though.

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[tlhIngan]

It appears that they are conceding any version of windows mobile is doomed and are embracing Android as the most Microsoft friendly Mobile OS. They will be less friendly with this move though.

Why? Parallels is just VM software like VMWare or VirtualBox. To run Windows apps requires a copy of Windows still, and Microsoft will be far more than happy for you to run a real licensed copy of Windows with ChromeOS.

What OS?

[Excelcia]

The last thing I would want to run a Microsoft app on is an OS that uses a web browser as its central UI. We already have a good office suite for Linux, and Office 365 isn't it.

Adding Microsoft support for their "everyone does everything with web browsers anyway so lets make an OS around it" OS is not going to magically make it less of a toy. There is a reason why there were 5 other stories posted since this one and this was still languishing with (at the time I'm writing this) 9 comments. If Google thin

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[nightflameauto]

I've long been of the opinion that Chromebooks are only good for one thing. Replace the OS with Linux. I've got two of them that have been great for doing web development on the go. Decent processors, replace the internal SSD with a large one and you're golden.

Why anyone would want to mash together the most non-OS OS of all time with the shit-show that is Microsoft software running on top is beyond me.

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[hatman9]

huh, i dont know why but i never thought to put linux on my chromebox. i'll have to check that out this weekend