It could not have been easy for former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz to pronounce the death of the operating system today.
Maritz, who is CEO of VMware, said during his keynote today that virtualization and new application frameworks combined represent the de facto operating system for the IT-as-a-Service era since the two layers of the new stack handle all of the hardware and application services once provided by operating systems.
Okay, Maritz did not pronounce the death of Windows verbatim but referred to the “changing role” of the OS as a legacy software layer that needs to get a new life. He did say the era of client/server is over.
“Hardware is going to virtualization and the role of abstracted services to applications is going to new frameworks,” he said. “The traditional operating system won’t disappear .. but is one component that need to fit into this world.”
The tide is going to change with or without VMWare, he said. But yes, VMware has all the virtualization software and application framework components needed in the third era of computing.
OS gone? An obvious conclusion, but coming out of the mouth of a former Microsoft exec? Ouch.
