The VDC OS will function as a kind of internal-cloud computing model, Maritz says, allowing users to access data from anywhere, with anything, and virtualizing applications, data, hardware, software, storage and, presumably, the vast supplies of coffee and pizza consumed by the army of IT people trying to make a VDC OS function.

"The traditional operating system has all but disappeared," Maritz said in his keynote Tuesday.

No, Paul, it hasn't. Every laptop, PC, server and application is still pretty firmly dependent on and limited by the operating system on which it runs.

Users are marginally more free of the limitations of a hardware-platform-based OS than they were before Google and Zoho and other Web-based app providers came on the scene. And IT departments are marginally more free to shift applications around and ignore hard-and-firm limitations on hardware than they were before virtualization became practical.

But we're nowhere near the point where a VDC OS, or even planning for it, is remotely practical. VMware has far too many holes to fill in and details to provide before anyone can take VDC OS seriously even as a Grand Plan, let alone a product roadmap.

I may have missed it, for example, but nowhere in either the coverage of Maritz' speech or the other announcements coming out of VMworld did I even see an explicit promise that VMware would build into its products the ability to manage Microsoft Hyper-V based machines.

VMware has been loath to do that in order to keep from adding either to the credibility or installed base of Hyper-V users. But if it's going to go beyond single-vendor-hypervisor server virtualization and server-farm management, the first step has to be the willingness to manage software created by other companies.

Portions of VDC OS, when and if it's delivered, might make the ability to manage Hyper-V-based VMs moot. But there's a lot of time between now and then, and a lot of non-VMware virtual servers that will have to be managed in the meantime. Without an explicit promise to deliver that specific ability it's hard to take even a micro vision of heterogeneous data-center management seriously, let alone the high-concept, Five-Year-Plan approach Maritz took.

There's always a lot of enthusiasm coming out of big vendor shows like VMworld. There are always grand plans and new visions and new direction that not only motivates the people who sell VMware, but the ones who buy it and have to struggle through the day-to-day problems of any major IT conversion project.