Parallels a company best known for creating mac virtualization software that allows Macs to run Windows apps will now be doing the same for Chrome OS. The company has announced that it will be partnering with Google to work on bringing Windows apps to Chrome OS enterprise devices.
This is a pretty big deal while Chrome OS has had virtualization for Linux & Android apps to this point both have had their faults. They are oftentimes glitchy and unreliable though we did get Minecraft to run smoothly with a little bit of effort. Adding proper Windows app support would be a huge step in the right direction as Windows apps are often still used in large businesses that have legacy apps. Or and we can all agree they just want to use Microsoft Word in the way it was meant to be used instead of the janky web version.
What we don’t know is how this is going to work Parallels only stated that the partnership would “seamlessly add full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, to Chromebook Enterprise devices.” They didn’t mention if this feature would be brought to consumers like myself running a Chromebook outside of a managed environment. I am hopeful though, if they can pull off this integration without much hassle we can expect Chromebooks to be more mainstream (as I write this on my Galaxy Chromebook). But for now, we will wait until this fall which according to Parallels is when we can expect this integration to be ready for Chrome OS.
Personally, I hope that this feature isn’t locked behind an “enterprise device” wall. Solely because while I am a GSuite user I know to not connect my device to GSuite as most Chromebook users could tell you, GSuite makes doing anything with a Google account much harder. For a while Pixel users weren’t even able to use Google Assistant properly if their primary account was a GSuite account.
