
VMware Is The New Microsoft, Just Without an OS - jnoller
http://gigaom.com/cloud/vmware-is-the-new-microsoft-just-without-an-os/
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rbanffy
I don't think their hold is nearly as effective as Microsoft's once was. The
hypervisor API is very simple compared to the OS and lock-in is practically
nonexistent. It's also not nearly as common - how many machines are running
hypervisors these days?

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kabdib
A competitor might be up against some interesting patents. (I am guessing, not
looking).

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sdizdar
Actually, VMware is more like Palm - they started something disruptive and
defined the market, but somehow lost the edge (Cloud Foundry is two years
after Heroku, four years after Amazon, etc).

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itgoon
Exactly. VMWare, right now, has the best tools overall. Everyone else is
playing catch-up.

However, everyone has caught up enough that there are plenty of choices for
competent hypervisors. VirtuaBox, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V - they may not be
enterprisey enough yet, but they work fine for more and more cases.

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te_chris
I was chatting to my friend who worked for MS NZ in their sales team and we
were talking about the usual "who's bigger, who are the main competitors" type
stuff. He asked who we all thought MS' biggest NZ competitors were. Naturally
I answered Oracle/Sun as one of the main ones. He just laughed though, then
told me that it was VMWare. If he knew, then MS are surely pretty keenly aware
of this.

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6ren
VMware's cap is a fifth of MS's ($40B vs $211B), I had no idea they were that
big. <http://www.google.com/finance?q=vmware>

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obtino
Also, EMC owns a significant majority of the company.

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marshray
It's obvious in retrospect.

Microsoft was about taking over people's hardware (i.e., protecting Windows'
installed base), VMware is about helping people utilize their hardware to its
full potential. It turns out that one of the fundamental thing we want to do
with modern workstation and server hardware is run multiple OS instances on it
simultaneously.

This surely sounded subversive, scary, illegal, and weird to MS leadership who
expected users to do web, games, mail, and office apps on their hardware. MS
required a per-instance license anyway, so how could they lose?

That said, I've heard good things about MS's virtualization technology, aside
from the little problem of it requiring Windows for the base OS.

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techsupporter
Using Hyper-V no longer requires installing Windows. The hypervisor can be
installed on its own (for free, even): <https://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-
server/en/us/default.aspx>

(Disclaimer: My group supports Hyper-V server.)

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marshray
Looks interesting, thanks.

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click170
I switched to VirtualBox a while back when I realized VB was Open Source and
VMWare wasn't.

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zabuni
That's not really their marketshare/growth area. The real money is the
enterprise stuff, and no one is as slick in there. Having hot swappable VMs
running on blades connected to a SAN with real time load balancing is as slick
as hell, as well as costing a pretty penny.

Add to that a really slick management console, and there's a reason why they
own the space.

I would question their long term (15-20 years) viability. The major part of
their enterprise profit is for legacy apps, virtualizing some fox pro database
backended windows 2000 box. It's a lot easier to virtualize the thing than
reengineer the thing. Sooner or later though, the requirements for all systems
go away, and stuff like that will get migrated to some newer system, cloud or
otherwise.

The market for straight cloud systems, like s3, is a lot more even.

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arethuza
I really don't think it's just for legacy apps - people install VMWare as the
base platform for enterprise data centers - it was a pretty smart move for EMC
to acquire them as it makes it a bit of a no-brainer to then have EMC SANs as
well which is most of the money typically goes.

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sunjain
Not sure I would agree complete with this assessment. Reason Microsoft was
able to get that kind of stronghold was due to applications(Word, Excel -
though they copied these - and others vendor apps/drivers written exclusively
for windows). It is pretty much the same reason why desktop Linux is not able
to make much inroads into the windows desktop OS market(it's the apps). Of
course Apple and Google are trying to just bypass this market
altogther(handheld, web). But it is the apps those matter and not sure where
does VMWare has the apps to lock folks into the VMWare?

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teyc
OS Virtualization is necessary because the software stack has got very
complicated. This is true not only of Windows, but on Linux as well. A working
server has moving parts from web config files to database configuration to
PAM. All these make redeployment from scratch a painful experience. It is
often cheaper to just copy a working deployment and tweak it.

Microsoft, in particular, has made this worse by keeping configuration details
in registries and not clearly identifying which keys should be exported for an
application to continue working.

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mey
Minor gripe, just because the contents are stored in the registry doesn't
preclude them from being exported or clearly identified. The clearly
identifying anything I entirely agree that Microsoft has done a poor job of.

Edit: more clarity on clarity

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teyc
You are right. The purpose of registries is for components to register and
announce their location. If a complicated piece of software has a lot of
dependencies then no amount of registry-fu will solve the problem of cleanly
migrating the application to another machine. Virtualization is the only sane
solution.

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recoiledsnake
Article feels very light on details and more like PR.

