Is Windows still relevant in the virtualization era?
Microsoft exec responds to VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s argument that operating systems are no longer the center of innovation
Virtualization has not stripped Windows of its relevance, a Microsoft official said in response to VMware CEO Paul Maritz's argument that operating systems are no longer the center of innovation in the IT world.
Maritz didn't actually predict that operating systems are doomed, but he did argue in his VMworld keynote that the role of operating systems in managing hardware and providing services to applications is being usurped by virtualization software and new development frameworks like Spring and Ruby on Rails.
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But the vast majority of VMware customers are still Windows customers, and VMware's technology would be useless without an operating system, Microsoft executive Mike Neil said in an interview with Network World. "If you buy a copy of [VMware's] ESX and install it on a machine, you get a blinking cursor," says Neil, the general manager of Microsoft's server virtualization and Windows Server division. "It doesn't do you any good, right? It has no inherent value until you run an operating system in a virtual machine. The hypervisor and the virtualization layer, which obviously VMware has been focused on, is interesting technology," he said. "It's a good feature for an operating system."
People have been predicting the demise of Windows for years, Neil continued. Maritz, interestingly, is a former Microsoft executive who led development of Windows 95 and Windows 2000. Despite leaving the Windows team only 10 years ago, Maritz said "there really hasn't been a lot of innovation inside operating systems for 20 years now."
When it comes to industry observers "predicting the demise of Windows, that was happening when Paul was in charge" too, Neil said. "I think if I was a company that was only developing a virtualization platform, that I would try to draw attention away from where the real innovation is happening in the industry, and that's still the operating system," Neil continued.
Maritz's support of Spring and Ruby on Rails also fails to mention Microsoft's .Net Framework, "the largest development platform on the plaNet," Neil said.
