[dayglored]

> I was wild about the VMWare IPO, but have cooled considerably to it. VMWare is about to get chopped at the knees by a start up called Xen.

Xen's been around for quite a while (first released publicly about 4 years ago). It's interesting, but I don't think it's a serious threat to VMware, business-wise, any more than Linux is a serious threat to Windows, business-wise. If it makes it up to "moderate annoyance-level" it will be doing well.

That's not to disparage the effort or minimize Xen's importance. Indeed, having recently upgraded my NetBSD systems to 3.1, I look forward to running Xen 3.0 on them and trying it out. But that's not the same as posing a significant threat to our use of VMware on all the main platforms.

Anyway, I'll be very surprised if the existence of Xen does anything to the VMware IPO, other than enhance it by demonstrating the broad applicability of virtualization in general.

[dayglored]

>> I was wild about the VMWare IPO, but have cooled considerably to it. VMWare is about to get chopped at the knees by a start up called Xen.

> Anyway, I'll be very surprised if the existence of Xen does anything to the VMware IPO, other than enhance it by demonstrating the broad applicability of virtualization in general.

As just pointed out above, VMware's IPO just happened, and was the biggest debut since Google's three years ago.

I'd say they did okay.