SpringSource-VMware: Hyperbole and hard talk

The acquisition of SpringSource by VMware has given rise to an effluence of hyperbolic prose on the subject. CNet’s James Urquhar declares that Java development will be revolutionized by the merger; Chris Haddad at the Barton Group discusses “SpringSource’s stratospheric journey” in a blog post so dense with buzzwords as to be nearly impenetrable.

For my money, I prefer the jaundiced eye of RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady. He points out that, whatever the long-term benefits of this tie-up (and neither he nor I doubt that they exist), much of VMware’s vision, like that of any publicly traded corporation, is to figure out how to grow beyond that initial market that they dominated. With this buy, VMware gets into a whole new line of business, and then can spend a year integrating the various pieces to hopefully create something that has a point to its existence. And O’Grady does an admirable job of succinctly summing up what the two companies have in common:

VMware’s virtualization play is, ultimately, about disintermediating the operating system by abstracting it from the underlying hardware. SpringSource, on the other hand, abstracts the application from the operating system. By loosening the coupling at both ends of the spectrum, VMware is in some sense attempting to decrease the importance and relevance of the operating system itself.

Of course, it was Java as a whole that was supposed to decouple applications from the operating systems on which they run. And I don’t think SpringSource is the only company that’s achieved this by any means. But it will be interesting to see how everyone else responds.