My company (Teamprise) develop a plugin for Eclipse to talk to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). We also have a stand-alone client and a command line client – all of which run on Windows, Mac and Unix. As well as helping to develop and test the product I often go out and demo it to people as it is one of those things that has got to be seen to be believed. It would be really nice to demo all three operating systems from the one machine. While I am still holding out for some virtualization support Apple have just announced a public beta of Boot Camp, their boot manager making it very easy to dual boot XP on a MacIntel machine.
While this is great tactic to encourage switchers from MS platforms into the Mac world, it will also be a boon for multi-platform development shops like my own.
I also find it very interesting that the page announcing this also talks about OS X 10.5 (Leopard) which is rumoured to have virtualization support built in to the operating system meaning you could dual run Mac OS X and Windows XP app without re-booting. Now that I would love to see – either through the operating system direct or via VMWare.
One of the most interesting bits about Boot Camp (for me anyway) is the resolution between a BIOS loader (Windows XP and Vista *still* use BOIS), and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) which is the model for the interface between operating systems and platform firmware that Macs use.
However, a former Starbucks barista poked fun at the idea of booting Windows anywhere you don't have to. "We have this shorthand term we use when a customer wants a nonfat decaf latte; we call the drink a "why bother". This is kinda like one of those".