Stories by: Kevin Fogarty

A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs.

Burton Group's Drue Reeves posted an amusingly indignant blog about Microsoft's guerrilla marketing shenanigans at VMworld last week.

You have to give Paul Maritz props for chutzpah.

I usually try not to write too much about what other people are blogging about-especially when some of the "people" are actually vendors. Bloggers commenting on each other can create a good discussion, but writing about what other people are writing about what other people are writing about gets you through the looking glass into WhoCaresLand pretty quickly, and I have a pretty short attention span anyway and-hey, look, a bird!

VMware is approaching the kind of turning point that defines a company as either a brilliant success or a flash in the pan, and it's not entirely clear which way it's going to turn.

Server virtualization and the products to make it happen get most of the attention in the computer business, for reasons that are currently valid but will erode as hypervisor functionality is gradually built into operating systems, system firmware or even BIOS.

There are very few things bloggers or analysts can do to erode their credibility with experienced IT managers than to say some new technology is going to change every aspect of computing within a very short time. IT people have just heard that way too often and know that even when it's true, the change isn't always an improvement.

It seems about time - after a week that included the release of yet another beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's release of sometimes-free desktop virtualisation, VMware announcements about desktop virtualisation and announcements from too many other companies to mention - to pick the winner of the fight for dominance in the virtualisation market.