VMware: Windows is toast
VMware thinks Windows has a very short shelf-life. Could it be right?
If you want to know which side of the Linux versus Windows world VMware is on, just ask Paul Harapin, managing director for Australia and New Zealand at VMware, who has sounded the death knell for Windows. His take? That virtual machines will shortly make Windows obsolete:
What that means is they don't need you to buy a large commercial operating system from Microsoft or anybody else....A product we have, Fusion, allows you to run all of your Windows or open source software on your Macintosh as if it was built for the Mac and you can't tell any difference in the way it runs.
We see that as the first step to seeing hypervisor-based desktop hardware where you buy your hardware and you buy your applications which just happen to be virtual appliances....
The operating system becomes just a very thin [Linux-based] layer necessary to run and optimise the application and it's the hypervisor layer that actually runs the underlying infrastructure all the interactions. Generally, organizations will take a Linux base and they'll cut it to see what they want. Then they'll bundle and build an appliance and ship that out.
Steven J. Vaughan Nichols thinks this is a strong hint at VMware's future as an appliance vendor, and not merely as a virtualization company. VMware needs to do this as open-source virtualization technologies cut into its business.
Regardless, it makes for a highly interesting operating system market - both desktop and server - for the decade to come.
Discovered through Linux Today. Thanks, Brian!