Game Guru Slips Microsoft Windows Onto Apple iPads

Game Guru Slips Microsoft Windows Onto Apple iPads

jon snyder

Game Guru Slips Microsoft Windows Onto Apple iPads

jon snyder

Steve Perlman built Quicktime video at Apple. Then he ran MSN TV at Microsoft. And through it all, he kept his famous talent for thinking outside the proverbial box.

If anyone can give you Windows on an iPad, it's him.

On Thursday, Steve Perlman's latest venture – OnLive – was due to release a free iPad app designed to do just that. And in typical Perlman fashion, it tackles the problem from an unexpected but completely sensible direction. Founded a year and half ago, OnLive is actually a gaming company. But rather than run games on your PC or your phone or your tablet, it streams them to your device over the net. Now, the company is doing the same thing with Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Using the new OnLive Desktop app, your iPad can access a virtual Windows desktop running on a distant server, complete with software such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Perlman and OnLive are simply piggybacking the tool on the infrastructure they built for their gaming service. "The funny part is that it uses the exact same servers, the same hosting software," Perlman tells Wired. "The only real difference is that now we needed a Windows license."

The new app isn't just an Apple-meets-Microsoft party trick. It's part of a larger trend, where more and more applications are moving off local devices and into the so-called cloud. Google offers its Google Apps suite of online office applications. Salesforce serves up all sorts of other business tools across the network. And if you like, you can access an entire desktop OS in much the same way.

Companies such as Citrix, VMware, and PanoLogic have long offered tools for serving up "virtual desktops" from your own servers, but OnLive is offering them as a service over the public internet.

Perhaps the most attractive part of the service is that gives you Microsoft Office. Redmond does not yet offer a version of its Office suite than runs on the iPad. Rumors indicate that this is in the works, but in the meantime, OnLive's new app and other desktop virtualization tools are the one way to use the full incarnation of Office on Apple's tablet. That said, a handful of app makers offer tools for handling Office files, including Quick Office, Documents To Go, and CloudOn – but they don't quite replicate the real thing.

According to Perlman – a serial inventor and entrepreneur known for everything from facial capture technology to a parallel processing system built for the Atari gaming system in the early 80s – OnLive has spent the last 18 months fine-tuning its infrastructure, learning how to deal with the ups and down of an online service that's available to anyone across the globe. As the company monitored its service, it realized the obvious: the peak times for games were not the peak times for business software. People play Assassins Creed at night, and they use Microsoft Office during the day. OnLive Desktop is an obvious complement to the company's existing game service.

What's more, Perlman says, the leap from one to the other is small. If you're delivering games over the net, you can't have choppy graphics or stalls. People will stop playing. After solving this problem for games, he says, delivering a desktop over the net is "piece of cake."

The new service gives OnLive a path into a brand new market, challenging outfits such Citrix. Asked how Citrix views Perlman's arrival in its territory, a company spokesman tells Wired that it doesn't see OnLive as "immediately competitive," pointing out that Citrix desktop virtualization tools are used by 230,000 businesses. But OnLive has at least one advantage. Like so many other products that are readily available to consumers, it has the potential to sneak into businesses through the back door.

Employees are increasingly using unsanctioned products at work, leaving CTO's scrambling to accommodate them. This includes hardware devices iPad and the iPhone, but also software services such as After the online file-sharing services made its way into businesses via individual users, the braintrust started getting calls from these companies asking to purchase a version of the tool specifically for business use.

Perlman sees OnLive Desktop taking the same path. "Gaming is a $50B industry," he says. "But the enterprise, that's something quite higher." (In 2012, says research outfit Gartner, worldwide IT spending will hit $2.7 trillion). Though the basic version of Online Desktop is free, Perlman hopes to up-sell consumers business to for-pay versions: OnLive Pro and OnLive Enterprise.

With the free version, you're told up front that while you'll have access to Windows, Word, Excel and PowerPoint and 2 GB of storage, you may not have access all the time. If OnLive is experiencing high bandwidth, those using the free service may be denied access to the software (though Perelman says that individual files will always be accessible ). What's more, the free version of the OnLive virtual desktop does not include an internet browser. The Pro and Enterprise packages do not have these restrictions.

Aly Orady –the CTO and co-founder of Pano Logic, an outfit that does virtualized desktops for PCs but not tablets – believes that OnLive has set itself up for use inside businesses, but he argues that many business will stiff-arm the service for security reasons. "They’ll see some resistance amongst security conscious customers that prefer to keep their data in-house, like government or healthcare with HIPAA regulations," he says.

Perlman points out that no data is stored on locals device, that all communications are encrypted, and that OnLive will allow IT managers to remotely log-in to a dashboard where they can manage devices.

OnLive Desktop came out of stealth mode on Tuesday morning when Perlman and company launched an official website. It's a little different from the company's game site, which is backdropped with galactic imagery and flashy video game covers. OnLive Desktop is still OnLive. But then again, it's not. "Corporations don't find buxom babes and machine guns up to their tastes," Perlman laughs.

Update: A spokesperson for OnLive tells Wired that the launch of the app has been pushed until Friday due to a high volume of signups.

Update: Aly Orday's quote was updated to better reflect his sentiments on security and desktop virtualization.