Customers don't care if your hypervisor works better than the other guy's. They care that they can use physical servers so cheap they're almost disposable to build disaster-resistant data centers that can shunt VMs and applications transparently from one location to another. They care that they can buy a $3,000 server and get $3,000 worth of use out of it, rather than 20 percent of that.

They care that they can assign more power or disk space or security or physical location to data and servers and applications without having to worry where the hardware is, how it's configured or how much dinking would be required to get the hardware to do what they want it to.

Focus on hypervisor comparisons and you're letting Wells Fargo claim its delivery wagons are in the same business as the railroad. Don't spend all your energy trash talking your competitors even when they trash talk you; talk about how the railroad can open up the West, shrink the continent and revolutionize the overland freight business.

I know it's traditional to spend a lot of energy running down the competition, especially when it's big and scary; but really, we don't want to hear any more about the damn wagons.