Unless you are living on Mars, or heads down updating your Facebook profile, chances are you heard the news yesterday that Microsoft held their coming out party for VDI.

There was some re-assurance on their Citrix XenDesktop strategy, RemoteFX (calista) exposure, and Dynamic Memory allocation tech, as well as some sales promotions. Oh, yeah, they also eased up on painful VECD licensing schema that so many of us flailed to describe to customers - tapping out with a predictable - "yeah, its kind of expensive and limiting".  Gone. Phewww.

I shall refrain from political commentary and instead focus on what I feel this means: VALIDATION+INERTIA

VALIDATION:

For many of us, the past 4-5 years have been about extolling the benefits of changing the compute architecture of end users. Yes, TS and Presentation have been around since forever, and so i guess i am (surprise) referring to full OS compute environments either in a data center, cloud, client hypervisor, etc - as well as APP, Profile, and Data abstraction and "virtualization" or, as i call it, VDI. 

Yesterday, the sleeping (or patient) Giant awoke.

What this means: With roughly 600,000,000 desktop PC's in corporate environments around the world, and with roughly, what, 99% of those running MSFT operating systems, office, browsers, etc., when the Giant says it is time to consider these new virtual desktop strategies....baby, its time.

Now, there are 600 million PC's - a very large market. Some will choose solutions based on technology, some will choose solutions based on vendor preference, some will choose based on vendor revolt, some will choose solutions based on an article their CIO read on the plane, and others will be a hybrid chosen for imeasureable reasons, and yet others will realize that NONE of the solutions are a valid choice at this state of the art in the technologies, if ever.  However - they will all begin to choose.

Microsoft just said, "look at your 600 million desktops - there are new choices you can make"

Whether you sell software, hardware, services, clouds -  this is a good thing. If you are a customer, this is a good thing. 

Some of you know i am fascinated by theoretical physics, and here is my observation not grounded in theory, but fact :

INERTIA -  "is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion- either at rest, or in movement"

While we all have leaned into the desktop market to compel its motion towards VDI - my belief is the forces brought to this effort by Microsoft are what we all need to change its current state - cautious optimism. And this has happened before. When we were all sitting at our IBM Selectra Typewriters - and this thing called the PC came along - it was Microsoft through operating system standardization combined with an ever decreasing cost of hardware, that changed the state of motion of the user workspace. They were financially rewarded for that activity, gained dominance, and power....the power to move markets into motion.  

Now, in other markets (browser, search,virtualization,  etc) one could argue they were not first movers.  However, their presence in a market, validates it as real. Makes you wonder if the Gartner prediction that VDI will be a $65 billion market soon wasn't onto something ;)

As we all sit around this weekend and try to figure out "what does this mean for vendor XYZ" - relax a bit. What this means, in my opinion, is that every vendor needs to sharpen their pencils, products, and presentations because this now IS, the year of VDI.

Enjoy

T.Rex

Founder+COO

Liquidware Labs Inc.

jtr@liquidwarelabs.com