I just guffawed out loud. My co-workers are giving me funny looks. It’s kinda the same reaction I had when Steve Ballmer proclaimed in his TechEd NA 2010 keynote that MS wanted nothing to do with you if you weren’t into cloud services (shareholders everywhere probably spat up their coffee).
OK: I have a pro-Microsoft stance on a lot of things and you may have noticed I criticise them too (see above). You can see what my favoured virtualisation solution is with too much difficulty. But, I do recognise there is a place for VMware (whcih I have used), Citrix (who have done some cool stuff), and Linus as an OS.
I’ve just read “VMware CEO Paul Maritz has questioned the relevance of the operating system … is a clear indication that operating systems such as Windows and Linux are no longer as important as they once were”. The general jist of the pitch is that the OS is dead.
Huh! OK … just what exactly is installed in all those VMs that are running in your Fortune 1000 customer sites? It is fair to say that Platform-as-a-Service has given developers more options. The problem with PaaS is that it’s a lockin mechanism. Marketing people call it stickiness. The idea is your customer cannot leave because its too difficult.
Cloud computing such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Amazon E2C, etc) are based on virtualisation, such as VMware ESX, MS Hyper-V, and (primarily) Xen (variants). That’s traditional VM technologgy that requires an OS. That OS needs to be installed, secured, managed, updated … all the stuff you do with physical machines. That workload goes nowhere. The OS is critical.
If cloud computing takes off (and I really don’t think it’s going to have the full impact that evangelists are proclaiming – see terminal services/Citrix in the late 90’s) then it’s going to be a combined solution…. PaaS and IaaS. But the OS and associated management are going nowhere.
By the way, I’ve seen some tweets where VMware are pitching View as a complete VDI solution. OK, so you have some machines that users will log into (more operating systems!!!). You’ll not that Citrix take a different view: those operating systems require some form of management and automation. It just so happens that these are usually the same mechanisms that are available for managing physical PCs. Without that … can you imagine a PC network of hundreds or thousands of machines with no management? No centralised patching of the OS. No application deployment. No software/license auditing. And so on and so on. That’ll lead to a real happy user base 😉
My advice: don’t burn your WIndows/Linux books just yet.