Columns

Technology is like a bus. You wait and wait and it looks like it's never going to arrive. But you can practically guarantee that once you get bored and start edging away from the stop, looking nervously over your shoulder, it will swing blithely into view.

I'll abandon the shoddy transport analogy now, but it's often the way that a technology seems to be just over the horizon literally for years. At the point at which everyone's thinking it was all hot air and promises, the infrastructure to make it go finally falls into place. One of the best examples of that was USB, which began with huge hype back in the late 1990s and then seemed to turn into a white elephant. Motherboards with USB ports were shipping for absolutely ages in 1997 and 1998, but Windows 95 and particularly Windows NT4 - the technological precursor to XP - had no clue what to make of them. That was academic anyway: there weren't any devices to plug into the things. Printers still used massive unwieldy parallel connections, complete with what looked more like hawsers than data cables to attach them; PDAs and digital cameras connected to your 9-pin serial port at the fire-breathing rate of 115Kb/sec (if you were lucky); and thumb drives were but a pleasing fantasy (and even when they did arrive they needed drivers installing from a floppy disk). Then suddenly we looked round, the bus had arrived and a computing world without the convenience of USB was all but unthinkable.

So now virtualisation is the new USB. It's been rattling around at the foot of everyone's agenda for a couple of years and, aside from some admittedly successful but frankly dull stuff about data-centre consolidation, the average person hasn't seen anything worth getting excited about. As with USB, though, the infrastructure needs to seep into all the nooks and crannies before you can hit the ignition. We're pretty much there now, with new CPUs having supported virtualisation features for a few years, and the average PC arriving with more RAM

ADVERTISEMENT

than even Vista needs. Virtualisation sucks up resources like nothing else - you're basically making Russian dolls with computers - so the hardware aspect is fundamental. Once that's sorted, you're on the home stretch.

The second key aspect is the software platform. Until recently, you'd have been paying a whole heap of money for an industrial one like VMware, or you'd have been winging it by nursing a freeware offering that only a geek could love. That problem's now totally solved, and you can take the free corporate offerings in the form of (the now free) VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual PC, or you can go the friendlier open-platform route and plump for the likes of VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org), which is stunningly stable and runs like a dream on either Windows or Linux hosts.

My prediction - hardly an earth-shattering one, I'll confess - is that the big news of 2008 will be virtualisation starting to make inroads into consumer territory. The dull-but-worthy chestnut of security will be the probable first step. Once it takes hold, it will be everywhere, and the idea of having just the one operating system running on one PC will seem as quaint as having to send away for public-domain software and wait for it to arrive on floppy disks in the post.

As far as the broader picture goes, 2008 looks like a year of flux. In many eyes, Microsoft's star is in serious danger of waning. It remains one of the world's most cash-rich companies and 2008 will surely be business as usual as far as its profits are concerned. Today's profits don't guarantee what tomorrow will hold, though, and the media sparkle is being cast in other directions. Microsoft is a very long way from the troubling situation in which AMD finds itself, but in the minds of many folk, Microsoft's only recent tangible coup has been the success of the Office 2007 interface. That's hardly a blistering performance from a company valued at over $300 billion. Despite abandoning Vista when it was in its original Longhorn incarnation circa 2003 and essentially starting again, the old Microsoft mindset is still plain as day. It continues to struggle with what the rest of the world is waking up to at frightening speed: simplicity. The company should have learned by now that lean and functional is good. But still products such as Vista trundle on to the market, bursting at the seams with complexity and features that no-one but a software developer could ever think were useful (six different options when all you want to do is shut down? Hello?).