But trying to fight Microsoft—a company that combines years-long we're-gonna-get-you FUD marketing with hard-slugging, into-the-boards scrapping—with uber-vision and a cult following just doesn't work.

The operating system is not dead; Microsoft is not passé (yet); the data center is not a clean-running center of excellence waiting to be elevated gracefully to the next level of technological Nirvana.

IT in general is nasty, brutish, and far longer-lived than any individual piece of it has any right to be. If Maritz wants to take over the IT market by building an all-encompassing data-center OS, he's got to deal with all the mess underneath the flow charts and misleadingly simple diagrams.

Expecting that from a company that, so far, hasn't even committed to being able to natively manage its competitors' products with its own management software—or allow competitors to manage its without inefficient detours through functionally deficient APIs—is too much of a leap of faith for me and, I suspect, most of the VMware faithful as well.