Microsoft announced today some pretty aggressive moves in the desktop virtualization space. First, they announced their acquisition of Calista Technologies, which optimizes the remote display protocol used in hosted and other VDI-like solutions. Technology like Calista???s, along with their alliance with Citrix, are important to VDI-like solutions to give end-users an acceptable user experience, especially with interactive or multimedia-rich applications.

Microsoft also loosened Vista virtualization licensing to allow Vista Home Basic and Home Premium to be run on a virtual machine. This is good news for all involved, as users no longer have to spend the extra money on the more expensive Vista Business or Ultimate editions just to run them in a virtual machine. They also announced official support for Microsoft Office running as a virtualized application.

Both of these are more aggressive moves than is typical of Microsoft. This really shows the importance of desktop virtualization to Microsofts future strategy and markets. The licensing change also shows Microsoft is serious about pursuing the vision of virtualization on the desktop and the flexibility that it provides. I also think Microsoft realized that users and IT administrators want the flexibility provided by virtualization, and that virtualization makes it easy to run any operating system. Vista adoption has not been going well by any account, and virtualization support may tip more companies into trying out and adopting Vista in the enterprise.

However, by embracing a VDI solution, Microsoft may be missing the boat. VDI and other remote desktop techniques still have some fundamental technical limitations: they require a server infrastructure, the performance is poor over slow or high-latency connections, and users cannot work offline. These run counter to the recent trends of more and more people working from home or on the road, or the trend of using individual employees computers for work. These and other reasons are why, as part of the NSF-backed Collective computing initiative at Stanford in 2001, we started working on the next generation of desktop management, which combined the benefits of VDI???s centralized management with the benefits of local execution. This work ultimately culminated in the basis of MokaFive technology.