China only won by accepting the Mongol conquest and civilizing the conquerors—changing the nature of the contest (probably unintentionally, it's true) by absorbing the invaders into their own culture.

In the computer business, Embrace and Extend (Smother and Subsume) is better assumed as a tactic for Microsoft to use against others, not one for others to use against it.

No matter how sincere its effort or pure its heart, it's hard for a manatee to smother a whale.

But VMware has a lot of advantages, but it's far from having a lock on everything having to do with virtualization, according to Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio.

"VMware is only the market leader in server virtualization. We are still in the very early stages of other segments of the virtualization market: desktop (VDI), application, storage and network," she says.

Citrix is strong in desktop virtualization; Microsoft is stronger than you'd think in application virtualization, following its 2006 acquisition of Softricity, she says. VMware responded by buying ThinStall, which still trails Softricity in market share. "It's too early to call the network or storage segments, although VMware has to be considered very strong because it's owned by EMC," Didio says. "Overall the competition among the vendors is intense and cutthroat which bodes well for enterprises. It means that ALL of the vendors have to raise the level of their respective games and deliver great products the first time out, give their customers better deals (than they would have in the absence of the various rivalries) and of course, deliver great value-adds in the form of management, security and after market technical service and support."

That's a much more parlous situation than a vendor just waiting to see how successful a rival will be with one product. It's a demand for either a major change of course or impressive acceleration.

The key will be to give customers who will be using Hyper-V or XenServer or other competing products anyway to do it as easily as possible. To succeed, it must be clear that VMware products have been designed to manage all aspects of a virtual infrastructure, especially if parts of that infrastructure are short-bus versions of VMware's own products from other vendors.

VMware needs not only to support products from Microsoft, Novell, Citrix, Virtual Iron and others, but do it so overtly and so well that Microsoft customers feel the need to explain why they're using Microsoft management products (which Microsoft promises will support VMware) even for Hyper-V. If they have to explain why, no matter what the merits, they use the more-expensive VMware products when there are cheaper alternatives available, VMware loses ground.