That's not a problem with EBS. It's not even a problem with the most recent versions of Exchange or SQL Server—the biggest resource hogs. It's a problem with the far earlier versions of those products, which were designed—as was Windows— without much regard for the computer resources they'd be using. Microsoft has always just assumed customers would gear up to run the newest, fattest software.

Once it shipped and made a big market out of Exchange and SQL Server, which it did quite effectively, Microsoft was trapped into supporting older versions even as it was trying to adapt the new versions to accommodate new developments like, say, virtualization.

It's not like most IT managers don't have legacy issues of their own. I've talked to any number who took bad jobs at startups specifically to build an IT infrastructure cleanly from the ground up.

But they don't usually think of Exchange or SQL Server as "legacy," and they don't usually expect commercial applications to be the holdup when they want to move to a new technology that should already be supported.

Convenience is the point of the ESS products, not flexibility. No one buys preconfigured mid-market business-application suites to fit highly customized environments.

Virtualization is hardly an esoteric technology, though, and Exchange and SQL Server aren't exactly high-performance computing. It shouldn't be necessary to make your hardware or virtualization choices based on what is, frankly, pretty mundane software.

There have been a lot of predictions—many made or instigated by Microsoft— that Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 would make VMware and the rest of the virtual-server products on the market irrelevant.

But, saddled with drawbacks and problems with an increasingly long string of products designed for the workgroup and implemented in the enterprise, Microsoft is going to have an even harder time with that conquest than it would have otherwise.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for them. Unless the briefing runs longer than 90 minutes; then it's every victim for himself.