This is good news and I'm glad that Microsoft realizes (a little) that they don't have to bundle everything together and try to force everyone to run Windows. Their hypervisor will be a standalone product, meaning you don't have to buy Windows Server to run it.
I think this is a great start towards selling effective solutions and letting the customer put together what they need rather than forcing them to buy into your entire solution. The whole battle to prevent Vista from be virtualized, prevent Linux from running on Virtual Server/PC, even the battle that is going on to prevent OS X from running on a PC is silly.
Consumers want flexibility and while they'll work within whatever scheme you set up, they'll also purchase less if you make it difficult. Look at iTunes? It's not any better than other services except that it's painless, easy, dirt simple to buy music and have it automatically appear on your device.
This new hypervisor, which allow multiple operating systems to share hardware, will sell for $28.
Twenty-eight dollars. How cool is that? I think they could easily bundle this into a lot of orders for MS software at $99 or $249 or some magic number and make money. Of course I know that there are some other free versions out there from Oracle, Sun, and others that may give them some pricing pressure, but lots of us would like to get an integrated solution and would just as soon use the Microsoft solution that might work better with Windows.
I like the bundle of SQL Server and all its sub-systems. They give me a complete data platform on which I can develop any number of applications. But I really think that this is a strategy that they should consider for Integration Services.
Keep the product bundled in with SQL Server, but it's such a completely separate environment that I think it could be sold as a standalone product as well. Imagine what would happen if you could buy SSIS to move data between your Oracle servers? What if you could buy this system for $249 or even $499? Most of the other ETL products cost much more than this (I know because they won't list prices. If they were hundreds of dollars, the price would be listed).
Just imagine how many people that got tied into SSIS might consider SQL Server for their next project.
Steve Jones
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