tl;dr

Valleywag is reporting that following the abrupt dismissal of former CEO Diane Greene by EMC, VMWare’s parent firm, they’ve lost another three board members — her husband Mendel Rosenblum quit (they offered him the job his wife was fired from! Just how clueless can you be?), product development VP Paul Chan, and research and development VP Richard Sarwal (more info from the NYT). This is the management team who did one of the smartest strategic moves I’ve seen in high tech in years — in 2006, just as the competition’s virtualisation offerings were catching up with VMWare’s bread-and-butter product, ESX Server, they made ESX Server free and released an impressively thorough (and expensive) tools management suite. At one stroke, they rendered their competitor’s new offerings moot (by making virtualisation software a commodity) and moved ahead of them (by changing the game to be infrastructure management instead, where VMWare has a commanding position).

Back to the present day, where Microsoft is pushing its all-new Hyper-V virtualisation platform with a big marketing campaign. I’ve not used Hyper-V yet, but I’ve heard very positive reports about it, and certainly on paper it goes a long way to closing the gaps between the current Microsoft virtualisation platform, the aging Virtual Server 2005 R2, and VMWare’s much more sophisticated offerings. I took part in a big evaluation of virtualisation technologies during 2007 at my former employer, and despite being a Microsoft shop, we didn’t even consider Virtual Server as the management tools where just so poor compared to the VMWare Virtual Infrastructure set. Hyper-V isn’t perfect but it seems much improved.

What does this add up to? Well, the share price is tanking, for one; it hovered around $65 throughout May and June 2008 but since the 9th July announcement of Diane Greene’s resignation it has plummeted, spending July and August in the mid-30s. It closed yesterday at $31.51, a 52-week low point. That’s a quarter of the 52-week high of $125.25. That’s a biiiig drop.

So, are they totally screwed? I don’t think so, actually. Consider this vomit-worthy white paper from some sort of Microsoft shill analysis firm. In amongst the usual PR smoke-and-mirrors that I could quote extensively but will spare you from, even this biased document is forced to admit that VMWare’s products still have the edge.

“Product depth is the single biggest differentiator when comparing VMware and Microsoft x86 virtualization. It can be argued that VMware has several distinct advantages when it comes to managing virtual machines — most notably in the area of virtual machine mobility (the ability to move live virtual machines with active sessions underway — also known as “live migration”). Further, it can be argued that VMware has done a good job in packaging — allowing it to sell its add-on management and infrastructure software as integrated software suites.”

Now, the white paper naturally glosses over this somewhat but in a production environment, these sorts of management tools that can move VMs around between host platforms on the fly are a big part of the draw to server virtualisation in the first place. Microsoft not having anything to compete with that is a definite knock against Hyper-V. So as it stands, VMWare still have some compelling product in the market place; but, in Wall Street’s opinion and my own, they’d better start pulling it together before Microsoft eat their lunch.

PS. Actually, I will quote some of the pro-Microsoft stuff from that report.

“Microsoft builds Windows, hence Microsoft controls Windows. Hyper-V is built in conjunction with Windows and can influence Windows OS developmental directions. … Microsoft’s plans to leverage this installed base by: Making virtualization available to everybody as a very low cost, integrated option.”

So, to paraphrase, Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the OS market and will therefore attain pre-eminence i nthe virtualisation market by exploiting the OS market. Uhh, didn’t we already go through this with the US Deparment of Justice and the European Competition Commission? Didn’t they both decide that was an illegal use of monopoly powers? I think they did!

Professional Virtualisation

Yeah, the RickRoll meme is stupid, but so is the rest of the internet. Cheer up, this is fried gold:

Personal Funny

Joystiq brings terrible news: Gordon Freeman has been spotted near the Large Hadron Collidor. Look!

So, the person present at the fictional Resonance Cascade is now present at the only thing mankind has ever made that might cause a real Resonance Cascade. Life is imitating art! Run to the hills! We’re all doomed!

Personal Funny

DailyWTF is usually pretty reliably entertaining, but this CodeSOD article particularly tickled me with:

I’m sure a lot of you would have mocked Josh’s collegue for having a constant named COMMA. Ha! Who’s laughing now?

#define COMMA "|"

Personal Coding, Funny

I would particularly draw your attention to the cost of this meal (£3.50) and the incredibly huge pickled onion.

Personal

Regular readers will know all about my borderline obsession with rhythm games, so will be unsurprised that I was glad to see details of the import process from Rock Band to Rock Band 2 has been detailed. It costs £3.40 and will allow you to import 55 of the songs on the Rock Band 1 disc into Rock Band 2. This is awesome — the first time that a rhythm game has allowed you to do this without swapping discs. In my experience, Rock Band comes into its element when you have a bunch of people together and having enough variety in the songlist for everyone to find something they know is crucial.

Now the bad news, missing from the import are three of my most favourite songs; Run To The Hills (Iron Maiden), Enter Sandman (Metallica) and Paranoid (Black Sabbath). Presumably Harmonix couldn’t get permission from the rights holders to allow these to be carried from one game to the next. On the other hand, in addition to those 55 songs, you can also bring any downloaded songs you might have bought with you. Added on to all the DLC yet to be released and the songs on the Rock Band 2 disc and you could have 500 to choose from by Christmas.

Which brings us to the ugly finale: would Harmonix/MTV please hurry the fuck up and announce a UK release date? Preferably sometime this year, although I accept that’s just a fevered dream. I might have to buy Guitar Hero World Tour just to carry myself over. RB2 is out in the States in a matter of weeks, but with no announced UK release date we can’t be getting it before next Spring at the earliest. I cannot explain how angry I am about this. I am praying the DVD won’t be region locked, which will at least open up the possibility of a grey import.

Personal Games

Beef, bacon, and pepperoni. Isn’t this in the book of Revelations as a sign of the End of Days?

That might not stop me trying one though.

Bacon, Food

Caught part of a show this morning on Radio 4, Between Ourselves, which consisted of John Major and Garret FitzGerald (former Irish Prime Minister) talking about life after power. It contained this most excellent quote from John Major, when asked if he recalled when he realised that power had slipped from him. (note: paraphrasing from memory)

“In the run up to the election in 1997, I knew we were going to lose. To win four elections in a row was amazing and a fifth would be an impossibility. I recall, at 5pm on Election Day, being stood in my garden next to my pond and taking a call where I was told that it was much worse than we had feared and that Labour was winning lots of what we thought were safe seats.

Time went on and eventually, at 2am, it was obviously all over. I telephoned Tony Blair to congratulate him and of course I had to go out through the Downing Street switchboard. I overheard the operator say ‘Mr Prime Minister, we have Mr Major on the line for you’.” 

Despite Major’s sincere protestations that he was glad to leave office, to be able to “wake up at 6am, turn on the radio, and not have to start making decisions about what I heard,” I imagine that still must have stung a bit.

Personal

1. It’s very fast.
2. Find-text-in-page is very nice, with a strip alongside the scroll bar showing all the matches.
3. It seems to hate the scrolly part on the right of my mousepad, jumping miles down the page at the slighest twitch (well spotted Toby).
4. It does its TCP/IP through the WinINet control, unlike Firefox. This means its traffic is captured by FiddlerTool without configuring a proxy.
5. The home page, which is what you see when you open a new tab, is really neat — it shows you a top nine set of thumbnails of your most used sites, and the last two tabs you closed (so you can undo any tab you closed by mistake). Admittedly, the first feature is pretty similar to Opera’s Speeddial option, and the undo tab close not as neat as Firefox’s feature (as the re-opened tab ends up at the end of the tab list, not back where it was).
    
6. Running each tab as a different process really is in there, as you can see under Process Monitor; this means you can see memory consumption for each of the sites you are visiting, for example.
    
7. The magic text bar in the browser is clever. It automagically hooks into Google search (you can configure which search engine it uses), your history, direct URL entry and (this is clever) local search options in sites. For example, I went to Amazon.co.uk and did a test search. Then I entered “a perl” into the magic text box. One of the options in the drop-down for what this would do was “search Amazon.co.uk for ‘perl’”. I think that’s neat.

Personal Hackery