VMware's Proprietary Virtualization is Still Under Fire

by Sam Dean - Jul. 02, 2009Comments (0)

Last year, I wrote a post on the precipitous share price drop, CEO ouster, and overall malaise that virtualization player VMware has seen as free, open source competition has threatened the company and its proprietary business model. VMware has released an open source virtualization client since then, as well as many other open source tools. Today, Matt Asay and David Cappuccio consider whether there are several analogs between Novell and VMware, and what lies ahead for VMware's proprietary model.

Cappuccio argues that in the face of market-leading, but costly technology, many users will opt for "good enough" alternatives. He points out that in Novell's case, Windows encroached on its market leading network operating system many years ago. He also points to Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization as highly threatening to VMware:

 

"It will be an integral part of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 7 in 2010. Why should you (or VMware) care? Because like "free networking", or "free SharePoint", Hyper-V will get used..."

 

It's a good point that Hyper-v being bundled in Windows will give it a leg up over other virtualization tools. After all, that's how Microsoft propelled its inferior browser and many other tools to market dominance.

Still, the case of Internet Explorer is good to consider in this context. It has dominant market share because it's bundled with Windows, but that share is falling. Firefox is far more extensible, Chrome is far faster and more stable, and more.

I'm not sure that I agree completely with Cappuccio that Hyper-V's free distribution, and "good enough" quality will make it a better choice than some of the open source offerings. Xen, VirtualBox, and many other free, open source virtualization offerings have the potential to offer more customization and extensibility options than Hyper-V or VMware offer. One thing's for sure: Microsoft's free offering combined with the free, open source virtualization products still spell big trouble for VMware's proprietary strategy.
 


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