More Citrix Synergy Announcements

Many of Citrix's friends have been making announcements at Citrix's big party, Citrix Synergy. I've heard from appSense, Scalent Systems, and VMlogix about what they're doing with Citrix XenServer or Xen Desktop. I guess everyone is doing their best to gain the market's attention before Microsoft finally releases Hyper-V.

Microsoft wants to get in on the act too. It has been speaking about the availability of RC1 of Hyper-V in the hopes of keeping the market's attention on their products. I've always been amazed by the fact that Microsoft can 1) announce a project that may eventually lead to a product, 2) announce several beta tests of the results of that project, 3) announce a trial of a release candidate of that product and finally 4) announce the release of the product and get media coverage at each step. I don't know of any other vendor that has been successful as Microsoft has been with this strategy.

Why do you suppose the media is so willing to act as part of Microsoft's marketing organization rather than telling the company, "That's interesting, but I'm going to wait until you have a real, deliverable product before comparing it to products that are currently on the market."?