Mark at VirtualizationStuff posted a great blog item about what VMWare needs to do to (a) step their stock slippage and (b) prevent annihilation by Microsoft. The comparisons to Novell are spot-on. This is good stuff people - that is: If you care about this stuff.
I still say that VMware should "give" away at least *some* flavor of ThinApp at this point. Just give it away. Maybe strip out the new 4.0 features like App-Sync and App-Link. Take it back a notch like Thinstall 3.x was prior to Tucci's gang of merry goons kidnapping them. That simply led to Microsoft acquiring Softricity (SoftGrid) and Altiris getting SVS (later consumed by Symantec) and now we have Citrix eating up XenApp and Oracle and VirtualIron and God only knows what's next (no, that's not another product name, sorry).
SoftGrid, at this point, is still too far of a reach for even most enterprise customers. I'm sorry, but if you have Software Assurance on every desktop, and THEN have to fork out another $28 per node to get MDOP (and hence: SoftGrid) that's a tough nut to swallow in a budget planning meeting. So what does VMware do? They offer up ThinApp at $5000 for a base package of 50 clients, and $40 for each additional client. Yuck! Why? Give it away.
Like I've already said before: Microsoft will probably just shove SoftGrid features into Windows 7 and be done with it already. That will kill off a major portion of revenue VMware may be counting on with future ThinApp sales.
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