Time to wear a dream to its grave

[continuum]

Today is a sad day
A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI | ChipLog
I have to realize that a dream I had for many years will never make it into reality.

I discovered Workstation in early 2002 - at the same time I also stumbled across BartPE. (Windows LiveCD construction kit)
Immediatly I thought that this 2 quite different things belong together.
In 2003 I started work. At that time everybody in the BartPE community told me that my idea was impossible - simply because Workstation requires a user-account and BartPE only uses the system-account.
I did not want to listen and started to work. I made good progress but then I reached a state where the account problem turned out to be a show-stopper.
During more than a year I spend several hours a day fighting a very small problem in the Windows registry. Damn ... - nothing worked and nobody could help.
I can be very stubborn but this problem appeared to be unsolvable.
Then one night in 2004 I suddenly found a solution - actually a very simple one - but I never seen it nor had anybody else.
From that moment on - the rest was easy and so I was soon able to publish a constrution kit for a LiveCD that was able to run virtual machines.
The obvious next step was to run the PE-Windows-system completely out of RAM for performance reasons.
Wow - now I had a system that could run VMs, outperformed any normal Windowsinstallation and best of all: was imune to any virus or malware.

For the next years none of my computers needed a system disk with an operating system - all I needed were drives with VMs.

I started to talk about this new way of running a computer to who ever wanted to listen - but surprisingly there was not a lot of interest at that time.
VMware still sold ESX and nobody else saw a use-case for running VMs from an uncorruptable, stripped down to the basics system running in RAM.
During the next years I tried to find someone from VMware here in the forums to show  what I was doing - still believing that the idea was so good that one demo should be convincing.
When VMware introduced ESXi - which basically uses the same concept . I was sure that WSi would get some interest as well.
But then slowly I had to realise that nobody from VMware would ever be open-minded enough to even ask for a demo.
I maintained the construction-kit during the versions 4.5 to 6.5.4
When version 7 appeared I noticed that it no longer was good enough to supply a good base for WSi.
I still believed that WS is a product that could change the way home-users use a computer.
But WS 8 cured me from that illusion.
While I regarded the feature list of WS 7 as complete and saw no use or need in new features at all the product-management obviously had a very different view.
The "autoprotect" feature is a good example.
Such a feature serves just one need: look good at first sight so that a 30 minutes demonstration at VMware headquarters be an impressive success.
Unfortuately a deveopment road-map that would satisfy the longterm power-users is not compatible with productmanagers that have to defend their decisions once every year.
When WS 10 appeared I thought: if it goes on like that there will be no WS 14.
So sadly enough - I am not surprised at all to hear the news today.
Well - there is one aspect that I am surprised about: I regard Workstation as a must-have tool for all vSphere-administrators.
It also worked as the point of entry into the world of virtualisation for many vSphere environments I have seen.
It is a surprise that VMware headquarters did not decide to keep the Workstation-team for this reasons - even if it is not profitable as a single product.
But then again the product-managers of Workstation could have realised the danger at the time when WS and ESXi for the first time used the same virtualHardware version.

Knowing that the race with VirtualBox was already lost they could have focussed on WS as a vSphere-tool instead.

Greetings to all the VMware engineers that also believed that Workstation could change the way computers are used by desktop-users.
This is sad day

Regards Ulli