Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Former Apple VP Bertrand Serlet Joins Board of Parallels

Former Apple Senior VP Bertrand Serlet, the longtime head of Apple’s Mac OS software team, and who left the company last year, is joining the board of directors at Parallels, that company said.

Serlet, who is often called the father of Mac OS X, worked at Apple for 14 years. At Parallels he will be a non-executive director. In a statement, Parallels CEO Birger Steen called him “the rare combination of a software visionary and master of execution.”

Serlet came to Apple by way of NeXT, the software company Apple so famously acquired at the end of 1996, in a move that brought Steve Jobs and several other key executives back to engineer what has been called the greatest corporate turnaround in history. Serlet worked on NeXTStep, which was an early foundation of OS X, as well as on OpenStep and WebObjects. He also spent four years as a researcher at Xerox PARC. He holds a doctorate in computer science from France’s University of Orsay.

Serlet’s departure from Apple was initially seen as a surprise, but was later determined to have been part of a planned transition, during which Serlet handed off his duties to Craig Federighi.

Parallels is best-known for the virtualization software that allows Mac users to run Windows and other operating systems on their machines. It’s a privately held company that has been around since 1999, and counts Insight Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. But it also sells the Plesk suite of server management tools.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”