Why Microsoft should worry about VMWare once more

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Has VMWare turned the tables on the competitors? Has it pulled off the great magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off the table while leaving the champagne glasses not only upright but still full of bubbly?

 Yes, I think so. Tonight, Contributing Editor Cassidy and I are having dinner with the senior Microsoft virtualisation people. And we will be reporting back tomorrow on their response to today’s announcements.

 But the move of VMWare to let anyone set up a cloud-computing infrastructure, to allow for SLAs and metrics in the delivery process, to let a customer have an internal business cloud or use a range of external cloud vendors (and cheefully move loads between them at will) has driven a hatchet through the lock-in plans of the existing players: Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

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Live from VMWorld in Cannes

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Almost live, at least: the auditorium at VMWorld in Cannes today had about 85% of the seats glowing with laptop screens, all Twittering like mad as each sentence fell from the lips of VMWare’s new Chief Executive, Paul Maritz.

I won’t do the CNN-style instant new shape of Western Civilisation thing, 10 minutes after walking out of the hall – but there are a few snippets that seem to me to put contexts down for future analysis.

One was that while we are all seeing end-users going nuts about netbooks, I could only see three or four netbook screens glowing away in the auditorium: the traditional laptop marketplace is alive and well in the hardcore techie sector, at least.

Two: the welcome slide featured more Eastern European languages than Western.

Three: there was more processing power in the audience’s smartphones than there was in the equipment visible on stage. This is a step change from the presentation given by Diane Greene in San Francisco 18 months ago, with a stack of servers behind her. A very long time ago, even before PCs appeared, I used to do presentations which depended on an 11-mile multiplexed modem link to go from the mainframe suite to the presentation projector, and people thought I was crazy: it’s taken until 2009 for a sizeable presentation to be done on a link being shared by all those Twittering laptops up in the gallery.