More thoughts on Parallels

Earlier in my postings I chronicled some of my experiences using VMware Fusion and Parallels. For a variety of reasons I decided to stick with Fusion. However, I never like to truly limit my experiences unless the product or whatever is a complete dog. Parallels is definitely not a dog. The company recently released their new version so I purchased a couple of upgrade licenses and I have gone through the process of upgrading one of my installs. The first one didn't go as smoothly as I thought it should. I ran the upgrade wizard which seemed to run OK and I was able to get into the VM. However, there was already a patch so I started that process as well. For some reason the patch install got hung and I waited and waited and finally I forced the VM down. Now I was pretty well convinced that I had just totally messed up that VM... forcing it down while it was in the middle of doing an upgrade. To my surprise the VM started up just fine and I restarted the patch process which competed this time.

The product has some nice new features: (www.parallels.com) and I haven't had time to check them out completely, but as I do, I'll post more here.

But if you read back through my original posts you'll see that my complaints about Parallels weren't so much about the product as the company. In fact, I think that Parallels does some things way better than Fusion does. The purchase of the upgrades caught the attention of their sales folks since I bought this as a member of my company and not as an individual. I got called one day by an account manager for my area to see how I liked the product and how I was going to integrate it into our business. I told the guy that we have a couple of Macs and that's pretty much it. Since I had his ear I did relate to him the issues that I'd had earlier with tech support and that's why I had moved to Fusion and why I was not using Parallels more fully. His response was very telling.

I had expected him to say.. "Wow.. I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened. Can I have some more information?" Or "I can't help you there, but let me hook you up with a technical manager and we'll see what we can do." Or "That's too bad and shouldn't have happened. We value all of our customers. I'll put you in touch with someone who can take your information so that we can improve the process." What I got was several moments of silence and then something like "Well... I mainly deal with corporate clients who are interested in rolling this out in their environment." 'nuff said.