Microsoft making moves in the Desktop Virtualization space

Microsoft announced today
some pretty aggressive moves in the desktop virtualization space.
First, they announced their acquisition of Calista Technologies, which
optimizes the remote display protocol used in hosted and other VDI-like
solutions. Technology like Calista's, along with their alliance with
Citrix, are important to VDI-like solutions to give end-users an
acceptable user experience, especially with interactive or
multimedia-rich applications.

Microsoft also loosened Vista virtualization licensing to allow
Vista Home Basic and Home Premium to be run on a virtual machine. This
is good news for all involved, as users no longer have to spend the
extra money on the more expensive Vista Business or Ultimate editions
just to run them in a virtual machine. They also announced official
support for Microsoft Office running as a virtualized application.

Both of these are more aggressive moves than is typical of
Microsoft. This really shows the importance of desktop virtualization
to Microsoft's future strategy and markets. The licensing change also
shows Microsoft is serious about pursuing the vision of virtualization
on the desktop and the flexibility that it provides. I also think
Microsoft realized that users and IT administrators want the
flexibility provided by virtualization, and that virtualization makes
it easy to run any operating system. Vista adoption has not been going
well by any account, and virtualization support may tip more companies
into trying out and adopting Vista in the enterprise.

However, by embracing a VDI solution, Microsoft may be missing the
boat. VDI and other remote desktop techniques still have some
fundamental technical limitations: they require a server
infrastructure, the performance is poor over slow or high-latency
connections, and users cannot work offline. These run counter to the
recent trends of more and more people working from home or on the road,
or the trend of using individual employee's computers for work. These
and other reasons are why, as part of the NSF-backed Collective computing initiative
at Stanford in 2001, we started working on the next generation of
desktop management, which combined the benefits of VDI's centralized
management with the benefits of local execution. This work ultimately
culminated in the basis of MokaFive technology.