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.

 VMWare’s CEO, Paul Maritz, used the analogy of the famous song from The Eagles – Hotel California – with a slight misuse of the line: ”You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

His point with regard to something such as Microsoft’s Azure, is that you need to change your app to run it on the cloud. And once you are in, will you ever be able to move to a different vendor?

 The enabling of an app-hosting virtualisation cloud ecosystem is a masterstroke, and immediately lifts the game to an entirely new level. 

Maritz knows all about software lock-in: he was senior vice president of Microsoft, running the entire Windows platform group, for most of the 1990s. Today he espouses an open interface, non-lock-in model using standards based interfaces.

 If VMWare can really deliver this during 2009, at least in first-release versions across the board, then there is no question that VMWare is changing the rules. Anyone, including myself, who thought that Microsoft had turned the tables on VMWare with its HyperV strategy, has been shown to be taking a short-term view. VMWare has laid out a long-term strategy which is extraordinarily enticing.

Read my latest missives from VMWorld in Cannes on my Twitter feed. 

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.