It's been one heck of a year for Apple. The company has been riding from one triumph to another, from the announcement of the iPhone at the Macworld conference a year ago, to its introduction in June, to the release of new Macs, iPods, and productivity applications, and closing the year with a surge in market share.

And now, the Macworld Conference & Expo is coming, running Jan. 14 through Jan. 18 in San Francisco. It's the time and place where the Apple community gets together to celebrate, to learn more about the technology, and to get excited about products to come.

Steve Jobs' keynote address starts the conference, and it's the highlight of the week. We'll talk soon about what to expect from Jobs. But for now, let's talk about what else is going on at Macworld. The conference will be a showground for virtualization technologies, the new version of Microsoft Office, a tribe of independent software developers, and events and exhibitions on the show floor.

Virtualize Your Mac

Virtualization has generated big changes in information technology, as users enjoy the benefits of running multiple operating systems on individual computers. Virtualization lets you enjoy a broader range of applications or lets you make one machine appear to be multiple machines, for robustness and ease of management.

With one exception, virtualization is a huge weakness for Macs. Apple forbids user from running the Mac desktop virtualized on other machines. If users could virtualize the Mac client, they'd be able to run the Mac OS on other vendors' hardware, and that just violates one of the fundamental operating principles of Apple's business model: The only machines allowed to run the Mac OS are Macs.

Apple recently opened a narrow crack in that policy -- it'll let you virtualize Mac OS X Server -- but only on Mac's own server hardware.

There is one huge exception to Apple's policy on desktop virtualization: You're allowed to virtualize other operating systems on the Mac. Parallels software for running Windows on the Mac shipped two years ago, and it's been a huge factor in the Mac's popularity surge since then; users can migrate from Windows to the Mac and still be able to run their favorite Windows applications. (Mac's own software for running Windows on Macs, Boot Camp, requires a complete reboot between Mac OS X and Windows.)

Parallels will be at Macworld showing off its latest technology, Parallels Server, which went into public beta Jan. 9. Parallels Server runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac, or on bare-metal PCs without any operating system, and it runs Windows, Linux, Solaris, DOS, OS/2, BSD, or -- per Apple's licensing policy -- Mac OS X Server when running on a Mac server.

The software is designed to bring the enterprise technology of server virtualization to small and midsize businesses without sophisticated IT support, said Parallels spokesman Ben Rudolph. "You can install it in two minutes and be up with the first virtual server in about 30 minutes," he said.