The frothiness in VMW and GOOG stock has to make you wonder if we learned anything during the dot com bubble or not (seems not). RVBD recently got an unpleasant Wall Street haircut for no apparently good reason other than a partial return to investment fundamentals. VMW and GOOG float above all that. Since VMW is now valued at roughly $40B and parent EMC at $47B if you do the math since EMC owns 90% of VMW, the market doesn't value the rest of EMC very much (to be fair the market knows that EMC can't just go and liquidate the position). The froth in virtualization places an intense and not very pleasant light on Microsoft and exactly where Viridian is (or isn't). There is no shortage of grim stories if they are to be believed. Microsoft should (in my opinion at least) get the Nobel Prize in Software for having collapsed all their operating systems down to a single code base, but now if you reflect on the consequences, there is high pressure to get Windows Server 2008 (the operating system previous known as "Longhorn") out, and pressure to release Vista SP1 (the likely trigger for real enterprise uptake) and in the middle of that you have the Viridian team trying to ram intimate hypervisor code right into the middle of the code base. Thank goodness I don't manage software development anymore! Anyway, if you talk to customers they all will look at Viridian when it finally shows up (a) because (remember) virtualization is all about Windows primarily and (b) it will be free and free is a lot cheaper than what VMW charges today. Or maybe VMW will conspire with private equity and do a hostile leveraged buyout of EMC, or even Microsoft J.

