I've heard all the arguments about why VMware's greater capabilities are, in fact, cheaper than having to kludge up a way to do similar things with feature-deprived products from other companies, by the way. There are still people, whether ill informed or not, who will put virtualization managers in a position to defend their own product decisions, largely based on price.

These people will often sit in the vicinity of the CFO's office, which makes them both hard to explain things to, and impossible to ignore.

Microsoft inevitably wins this argument unless the benefit of using VMware to manage other company's products is so clear and so easily cost justified that an IT manager can explain it to the CFO with one paragraph's worth of single-syllable words and absolutely no three-letter acronyms.

Managing multivendor virtual infrastructures would be a major benefit, but VMware could also take advantage of all the storage and consulting and integration expertise of parent-company EMC to build itself out as a full-service data-center supplier whose particular strengths are the efficient use and management of IT resources through server and storage virtualization and management.

That's a mouthful, but it's a strategy, not a product comparison and not a price comparison.

No matter how often it's said its expertise is in data-center technologies or how many of its products actually work effectively within a data center, Microsoft has never been able to build a lasting case for itself as a replacement for IBM or EDS or any other build-me-a-datacenter services company, and probably never will.

VMware has a good chance to put itself in that position, building a firm future for its products and its customers in the process.

So far there are no clear signs that VMware (or, more importantly, Joe Tucci and the rest of the EMC board) have decided to do that. But I wouldnâ¬"t be surprised if they had something like that up their sleeves. I'd be disappointed if they didn't, in fact.

I wrote a few months ago that I thought VMware was trying to turn itself into Banyan, and I think it still has a good chance to do so. (I loved covering Banyan, by the way, not because of the arrogant aloofness of its management, but the uniquely bitter enthusiasm with which its customers supported it, even knowing it and its "superior" technology was doomed by onslaught of Novell's relentlessly effective marketing machine.)

It would be a shame to see that happen, though, considering the track record VMware has already built up, the scope of the redesign it engendered in what is considered mainstream IT and, most of all, the emotional, intellectual and financial investment its customers have made in it.