What goes up... (virtualization market)

...must come down. You know that old saying. I think it was a dude named Newton that first came up with that gravity thing, right? Well it seems that while I was blissfully away at the beach, the virtualization market came back to reality a bit.

Between Diane Greene being thrown out of the VMware car at a high rate of speed and their acknowledgement that VMware revenues will be a bit lighter than expectations over the rest of the year, you get the feeling that a bit of the helium in the virtualization balloon is escaping into the atmosphere.

By the way, that doesn't mean that I don't believe that virtualization is a critical technology and that it's going to be growing quickly for a long time to come. I do. With legitimate competition from Microsoft and Citrix, VMware now has a fight on its hands. Which is great for customers, as pricing will come down and innovation go up. That's they way competitive markets work.

Since I do focus on security, this is just more ammo for me relative to my positions that virtsec is largely a hype market for the next few years. I don't need to rehash that again.

So why bring back up the topic of virtualization? I just like to poke fun at all of the folks that believe the world changes overnight. Yeah, mostly vendors, but the media (and a lot of analysts by the way) are also willing accessories to the crime. Disruption does not happen in the blink of an eye. I believe that old adage that we overestimate change over a two year period, but underestimate change over a decade. I've seen it and lived it, and it will happen again.

In 2018 (as if I could predict further out than breakfast tomorrow), the fundamental computing infrastructure will be radically different. You could guess that a lot of processing will happen in the cloud and that we'll have open (maybe even secure) APIs to weave together our interfaces, logic, and data. Yet things in 2010 will look largely the same as they do today.

Maybe. Who the hell knows? If there is any rationalization I'm coming to grips with is that I'm pretty crappy at predicting.

In fact, we all are. This is going to be a major research focus of mine in the second half of the year. How do we make decisions when we are crappy at predicting the future? Stay tuned for that.

Photo credit: "img_0906" by mbeldyk