Citrix Redux
From the “History Repeats Itself” department…
Is is just me, or does all the arm-wrestling between VMware and a certain software giant in the great Northwest look like a replay of the fighting that went on between the aforementioned software giant and a little company called Citrix way back in the salad days of 1997?
As I recall…
Citrix’s WinView was a game-changing, watershed moment in the delivery of DOS and Win 3.1 apps, particularly over low-bandwidth links.
So Microsoft, who invested $1M of its own money keeping Citrix afloat, licensed the source for Windows NT to Citrix, who transmogrified it into a multi-user server product called WinFrame. Which in its own right was a game-changing, watershed moment that single-handedly made server-centric remote computing the single hottest thing since sliced bread with jam and butter on it all the way back in 1995.
Almost as soon as the candle on their rocketship was lit, it all came plummeting back to Earth. In 1997, Microsoft took its toys and went home by pulling Citrix’ license to NT 4.0. MS planned to forge their own multi-user computing solution. Which they did. And which ran like crap, frankly.
So, they decided they wanted to license some of Citrix’ key technology. Which Citrix could either agree to, or basically go out of business.
Lo and behold, Windows Terminal Server Edition was born.
For their part, Citrix was allowed to continue to sell their software as an extension of MS’ Terminal Server, but not as a direct compete.
So with virtualization emerging as…
- The greatest thing since sliced bread with butter and jam
- A game-changing, watershed moment in the delivery of nearly every aspect of computing infrastructure
- An area in which MS has not only expressed interest, but is also taking steps to assure their dominance
It stands to reason that mothership would be playing some hardball, right?
Now, I’m not sure it’s an apple-to-apples comparison when looking at Citrix v. MS and VMware v. MS, for one simple reason…
VMware has an insane amount of support from the open source community
That, in and of itself, gives VMware a certain amount of legitimacy, no matter what kind of cockamamie support restrictions MS wants to put on 3rd-party virtualization solutions.
And quite frankly…
As bad as official MS support has been getting, I’m not so sure the lack of official support is a liability.
|| posted by chris under business, nostalgia, opinion, virtualization || || ||
