Mailbag: If You Ran VMware
Doug
asked
readers recently what they would do if they ran VMware and needed to take
on Hyper-V's pricing (read: free). Here are some of your suggestions:
What would I do if I was VMware? PANIC.
-Anonymous
Well, I would ultimately slash the price of the ESX products, give away
the Workstation and servers for free (but have fees for support), add more
hardware vendor support or alliance, and publish more books or best practice
guide documents.
-Cornelio
Here is a plan for VMware: Provide a hypervisor and a VM maker for home
users. Servers are where the money's at, but if you want users to keep your
name, you have to provide the same wares at home. Well, maybe not the same,
but something that will transfer readily between work and home.
What I envision is a VM platform that would allow a home user to run
one or more OSes independent of the hardware. When it's time to upgrade your
hardware to a better system, you just package up your system as-is, copy it
somewhere (online storage, DVD, whatever), get your new machine and drop it
down. How many people are forced to move to Vista (for example) because they
got a new laptop? If it were a VMware microkernel, they could just mount their
old OS on a new system -- no fuss, no settings to reset, no new or significant
nuances to learn. No doubt people would pay a PC premium for this ease of
use, and it would knock down Microsoft significantly as it cannot force a
vendor to upgrade to its new OS package since any VMware-ready machine would
be OS-independent.
-Tom
A price increase might work for Smirnoff vodka, but it won't work for
software. It's the death knell for VMware. Just ask your corporate managers
who will force you to go with the lower-cost alternative -- especially from
a name-brand vendor like Microsoft.
-Mike
Add Pat to the ever-growing list of people who don't like Vista:
No, you are not being too rough on Vista. You're just not being rough
enough. I have been preaching to all my users not to purchase computers with
just Vista alone, but to purchase business PCs with both operating systems
on them (Vista with a downgrade to XP). This way, they can choose and later
ease into Vista if they want to or when Microsoft cleans it up. Some of my
users did not heed the warning, went out and purchased a new computer, and
are now complaining, "It operates too slow, can't get on the Internet,
stops me from creating documents," and the list goes on and on.
I personally do not own a Vista computer and will not until Microsoft
fixes the kernel, but if I wanted to imitate a Vista computer, all I would
have to do is to let my XP Pro computer get fragmented and full of temporary
Internet files.
-Pat
And if you're an iPhone fan that gets teased
for your iFervor, give this reader's advice some consideration:
In response to the YouTube
video you referenced, I was really hoping to see some pwnage, but I didn't
see or hear any. That guy didn't own the reporter; he sounded like he wanted
to go home and cry. Where's his sense of humor? I was expecting some kind
of humorous response in response to a pretty humorous question.
How about answering the question, "Have you ever seen a woman naked?"
with, "Why, yes, in fact your mom told me I'd get an encore of her performance
last night if I stood in line to get her the new iPhone. But I'm actually
getting this one for myself. I wouldn't pay to see THAT again." Did I
miss something?
-Chris
Got something to add? Let us have it! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail
to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on July 22, 2008