Well, it's not like no one saw it coming, but somehow it still came as a mild shock: MacFixIt reported yesterday that Connectix, that longtime Mac developer who brought us such groundbreaking titles as RAM Doubler, Virtual Game Station, and, of course, Virtual PC, has "closed down the customer service section of its web site" and its forums. Why? Because Virtual PC was its final remaining product that hadn't been sold off or discontinued, and Microsoft snapped that one up earlier this year. So what's left of Connectix, you ask? Well, that's a darn good question, Miffy; everything we'd seen before implied that Microsoft bought Virtual PC and not Connectix itself, but the newly-closed support section states otherwise: "With the Microsoft acquisition of Connectix, effective August 6th, 2003, Microsoft will provide technical support on supported versions of Virtual PC."

So unless that statement is way off base, apparently what we've got here is, indeed, another full-fledged sellout to the Borg. And yet, despite the fact that we here at AtAT have bought at least one copy of just about every product Connectix has ever shipped, somehow we don't take this nearly as personally as the Great Bungie Defection of 2000-- possibly because we never baked Connectix cookies as a thank-you for continuing to support the Mac platform. And before you go blaming Connectix's sellout on our failure to bring the company a piping-hot tray of Toll Housey goodness, may we remind you that Bungie sold out, too, despite having wolfed down a batch of fresh sweet eats from our ever-lovin' oven. Contrary to what we believed in our foolish youth, baked goods evidently can't solve all the world's problems.

The good news, however, is that, unlike Halo ("any minute now, we swear"), Virtual PC for the Mac is immediately available as a supported Microsoft product-- for now, anyway. If you own a copy of 6.0, you can even download an update to 6.1, which reportedly doesn't really do a whole heckuva lot except slap Microsoft logos all over the place, but Microsoft claims that it will allow you to "seamlessly transition product support to Microsoft" and offer you "the chance to receive future updates and new bug fixes." And now that it's a Microsoft product, chances are decent that you're gonna need those bug fixes. Often.

If you don't already own Virtual PC and for some bizarre reason you want to defile your Mac with an x86 operating system, the good news is that now there are two ways to get it. You can either purchase a standalone version ($129 for the virtual machine alone, $219 to $249 for a copy with a version of Windows-- gee, where's the Linux version?), or you can get it bundled into the newly-announced Office v. X for Mac Professional Edition, which is basically the same version of Office that was available yesterday, only with Virtual PC thrown in for "free." (If you just want Office, there's some good news on that front, too-- now the "Standard Edition" is a hundred bucks cheaper at $399, and the "Student and Teacher Edition" is just $149.)

Now, we make no secret of the fact that our paranoia of all things Microsoft goes way beyond rational thought, but does anyone else get a little edgy about the inclusion of Virtual PC with Office? Sure, our rational selves (yes, we have them; they're just really, really small) think this is terrific; corporate Mac users get native versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (plus Entourage, with its increasing support for Exchange Server) together with a Wintel emulator to run any corporate apps that may not exist for the Mac. Sounds like a very positive package for Mac fans at work, right? But the raging paranoiacs within us can't help pairing this news up with the unconfirmed murmurs about Microsoft planning to cancel Mac Office development entirely; what if, in the future, Office v. X for the Mac winds up being Virtual PC bundled with the Windows version of Office? Eeeyyeeeewwww.