Virtualization at 50,000 feet

So here's a view on what's happening (the proverbial "big picture"): (1) MS has successfully queered the virtualization price structure making VMW offer the hypervisor for free. (2) That makes it clear that VMW isn't going to grow just selling the technology -- it's the higher level systems and management tools that you'll get paid for -- so they have repositioned themselves as a data center O/S company. (3) But that means that they are in a sense admitting that MS has been right all along -- virtualization is important but it's only one piece of a puzzle -- it makes VMW's position against MS scarier. (4) The vision is now clearer -- we want services that can be moved flexibly throughout a resource fabric (enterprise data center and cloud service provider) -- and we want an individual to be able to get to his personal (virtual) system from more or less anywhere and anything in the world. This is the attractive future that virtualization promises. The problem is that compared to virtualizing a single server this is really difficult system engineering and is going to take a lot of work to accomplish. Progress is going to start to slow down fairly dramatically as we collectively grind on these really hard problems. Don't get impatient. Sit down, watch a baseball game, smell the roses.