No Support for Boot Camp Applications… Yet

Publish.com questions: “Who Will Support Your Graphics Software Running on Boot Camp?”

Apple’s announcement of Boot Camp, the application that will allow Mac users to run Windows on their Apple computers, seemed to have caught everyone unprepared.

While it is an advantage for users who continually switch between Macs and PCs, the lack of support for PC software used on Intel-Based Macs might outweight the advantages. Or maybe it won’t.

The majority of the industry-standard graphics software runs on both Mac OS and Windows, so I personally don’t see any advantage about using, let’s say, a Windows version of Photoshop on a Mac. If someone already owns the Windows version of Photoshop, why, he already has a PC, otherwise he would have bought the Mac version. That holds true for any other desktop publishing and software.

Publish.com covers this subject in an article where they also say:

Yet, maybe aside from AutoCAD, I don’t see designers needing badly the other two Microsoft applications.

While Publish.com targets designers with their article, I see Boot Camp (which will be incorporated in Mac OS X Leopard, even if with another name) as another step towards making Macs available to the non-designer.

As Boot Camp news is still fresh, software companies might be unprepared, yes, but I think many of them, especially companies like Apple, don’t see the point of providing support–the same way you wouldn’t buy skates to drive a car, you wouldn’t purchase a Windows version of InDesign, only to buy not only a copy of OS X, but also a copy of the Windows operating system itself, in order to run InDesign on your Mac.