Is VMware going the same way as Novell

Over the last few months I have been thinking more and more how VMware could well be going the same as Novell did back in the 90's.

For thus who do not remember back in the mid 90's Novell went though a stage of buying up some very large names and tried to take on the Evil Empire that was Microsoft, during this time they took there eye off the ball and lost there lead surprising quickly in the directory services game.

I remember going to a Compaq Conference in 1995 in Huston where we had Frankenburg (the CEO of Novell at the time) and Bill Gates (remember him) in the afternoon Novell told us in the morning that there market share and presence was that strong that if they never sold another license then they would still be the dominate PC networking company for the next 10 years. Well that certainly did not come to pass did it.

As a said to start with I'm beginning to see history repeating it self with VMware and Microsoft, at present yes VMware does have a good lead and much better technologies, but this will not last and if they keep alienating there customers by increasing the license costs (Enterprise Plus) then it becomes a much easer move to Hyper-V R2 given that the cost for that is Free.

Hyper-V R2 will give you HA, and Live Migration and given that under most circumstances Customers will be buying Datacenter licenses anyway as they run Windows VM's on the host, this means the most compelling reasons to go virtual, workload protection and mobility are free in much the same way that Directory services became free with Active Directory and we all know how that ended up don't we.

Spence...