Microsoft Virtualization Road Map

In a press release dated the 22nd of May 2006, Microsoft outlines their Virtualization Road Map. Mostly well known news there, but one thing caught my attention though was the following passage:

Intent to acquire Softricity, Inc: Softricity’s application virtualization and streaming technologies provide application compatibility and accelerate corporate desktop transitions to Windows Vista.

Softricity is an american based company which makes a very nifty application virtualization suite (Softgrid) that helps you entirely sandbox applications in their own virtual environments. Often used in combination with Citrix based Terminal Server solutions, but their applications also allows you to stream applications to a desktop computer. To me, this sounds very much like Microsoft is definately moving towards a more "applications as a service" approach, and moving away from traditional software installation/distribution. "Pay-as-you-go" applications, available anywhere and at any time, virtualization and more. Seems like Microsoft is really shifting gears and they do start to look more like a service provider than an a pure OS/Office provider than before. For more reactions and analysis on how this will affect how we distribute software in Windows based solutions, check dabcc.com Be sure to catch Bill Gates Keynote at Winhec live at 9PM PST on the 23rd of May. I'm sure these topics as well as Terminal Services are going to be covered.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel