Thin operating system: No platform to enter cloud mode

"Both hardware and operating systems will be the future of thin clients," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive of VMware, when he visited China a week ago, and again emphasized "thin operating systems".

And this is also able to respond to Microsoft's recent evaluation of VMware.

Because nearly two weeks ago, Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's server and tools business, said, "Only a handful of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook will have the ability to write cloud apps because the resources are in their hands." And companies such as VMware do not have a corresponding platform, it is certainly not possible to write these cloud applications. ”

The new programming platform will become the core

In Paul's view, as the development of virtualization, the role of the operating system will change, it will not be as in the past in such a central position. The traditional operating system accomplishes two important functions: one is to deploy the hardware and the other is to deliver the service to the application. Now these two functions have been taken over by two new software layers. As for the operation and provisioning of the hardware, it has now been taken over by virtualization, while the new programming framework can play an important role in delivering the service to the application. In other words, a new layer of software has been added above and below the traditional operating system. As a result, the operating system's importance will inevitably diminish over time, "Paul stressed.

"We're in the middle of an application-centric world," and "for users, they won't have to worry about where the application is running, whether it's under PowerPoint or on the Web." Users will be freed from their attention to the computer to think about the software, such as the status of all working files, "Paul says. "You can choose a lightweight, flexible client device without having any ownership of the local device."

From VMware's technology strategy and marketing strategy in the 2010, we can see that Paul has put his ideas into practice. For existing applications, he says, VMware will provide developers with as many tools as possible to help them seamlessly connect and encapsulate existing applications with middleware and hardware, enabling applications to be delivered to customers in a more easily deployable way, as VMware is called virtual Appliance.

Paul explained the move in detail, "We're going through a huge shift in the way we use development." Today's developers are no longer just developing apps based on traditional operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and Unix, which means that ISVs can make it easy for their customers to install and run applications on virtualized platforms. For newly developed applications, VMware is also constantly promoting new programming platforms such as spring, a new open source standard based programming platform. Programming platforms like this make applications more efficient in programming and development, and can be deployed faster, easier, and scale scalable. ”