VMware's base system software runs leaner than existing versions of the fetal Hyper-V, using fewer resources to support any individual VM, allowing a higher number of VMs per physical server and increasing the consolidation ratio available to the customer, according to VMware director of product management Ben Matheson, who made the case eloquently to me in an interview this week.

Cost savings and consolidation are only the first stage in getting anything out of virtualization, though.

Matheson also talked about all the other things VMware offers—disaster recovery capability, transparent provisioning and relocation of VMs, high availability and other advanced-management functions—the kinds of functions you need to transform your data center, not just shrink your server count.

But he—and every other VMware exec I've spoken to, hear speak or read about in the news—always come back to how much better their hypervisor is than Microsoft's.

That's like an airline trying to get your business by telling you how fuel efficient its planes are, rather than how cheap, safe and convenient its flights are. Fuel efficiency is really important, but not as important as getting you out to the opposite coast alive and on time.

Efficient server virtualization is also really important, but not nearly as important as being able to treat all or most of the hardware in a data center as completely imaginary and shifting your applications or servers around at will to make the most efficient use of computing resources no matter where they live.

That's how customers save money, trouble and time. As obsessed as many IT people are about the technology itself, servers don't matter. Operating systems don't matter.

To a large extent, even applications don't matter. All of them exist only to allow companies to pay their bills, pay their employees, schedule their businesses, email their partners, analyze sales data, and IM their friends about fantasy baseball.

Servers, systems management, hypervisors and all the other stuff covered in the IT budget are just means to those ends.

So focusing on the elegant engineering of something as basic and undifferentiating as the hypervisor not only misses the point, it risks putting VMware in the position of fighting over minutiae with a company that isn't remotely able to compete with it in the virtualization technology that matters.

Having a hypervisor does not make you an effective data-center-quality virtualization vendor; even if you're Microsoft

Endlessly telling customers that your hypervisor is better than Microsoft's does not make you a good competitor. It makes you a sucker for FUD.