RON HERARDIAN
President of Global System Services, a Mountain View, Calif.-based solution provider
The real story is virtualization. If an IT customer can run 20 Linux application environments in on a single virtual machine host (e.g., VMware or Xen), but only 10 Windows environments, that would hurt Microsoft.
As a result, Microsoft has to do two things: (1) They have to make Windows servers smaller and more efficient to maximize the number of Windows instances that can be run on a single virtual machine host (such as a VMware ESX or Windows Server 2008 machine), e.g., their MinWin project; and (2) they have integrate virtualization technology deeply into the Windows server platform, i.e., build it into Windows Server 2008.
Obviously, by tying virtualization to Windows and making it practically free, Microsoft is following the long established (and much repeated) pattern of making virtualization a zero-sum game for competitors. When EMC makes VMware an open source project, it will be the signal that Microsoft has won the virtualization war, just as they won the web browser war and the enterprise e-mail war and the desktop office suite war before that.
