Another Hit from the VMware Crack Pipe

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update. I’ve been transitioning to my summer home on Mauritius (always an arduous task, but more so with wife, 2 children and 4 notebook computers in tow), however, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to enjoy another hit from the VMware crack pipe. This time the fantasy comes courtesy of company co-founder, and chief “scientist,” Mendel Rosenblum. Mr. Rosenblum used the podium at LinuxWorld to wax poetic about what he believes is the impending death of the operating system as we know it. In his version of the future, customers will move away from the traditional OS model and towards one dominated by “virtual appliances,” where an individual application and its supporting OS are “merged” into a single, isolated component that runs atop a virtualization layer (i.e. VMware’s classic hypervisor scenario).

My response: Man, am I glad this is all just a hallucination!

But what if it weren’t? What if every application came tied to its own, proprietary implementation of whatever OS its developer decided was ideal? What if we actually had to support and maintain such an albatross? How about in the desktop space?

Having to master Windows, Linux and (maybe) MacOS, with their myriad complexities and runtime quirks, is hard enough. Being forced to tweak a “merged” virtual machine image for each application is enough to make me re-consider that career waste management (at least there I’d know in which direction all the “”bits” are supposed to flow).

Frankly, I’m glad this is all just a smoke-induced delusion. The damage that such an archaic compute model would inflict on innovation would be fatal. The majority of advances in client computing hardware – the advanced graphics, rich multimedia and diversity of plug & play peripheral devices – can be traced to a single driving force: Microsoft Windows running natively on the bare desktop iron. None of these technologies works well with virtualization, which is why IT isn’t yanking desktops en masse and replacing them with Mr. Rosenblum’s pipe dream. They’d have a riot on their hands.

In the end, I think we all can appreciate VMware’s dilemma: When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. However, I really wish they’d dial-down the hyperbole a bit. Windows, the bloated, insecure, monolithic OS that everyone seems to love to hate these days, isn’t going anywhere. After all, Microsoft needs *somewhere* to deliver all of those SoftGrid-enabled subscription applications it has lurking up its competitive sleeve.