In the end content drives adoption. I refer you to Apple’s iPhone platform and the game changing nature of the AppStore. For those of us old enough to remember, look at Betamax and VHS and Sony’s subsequent acquisition of much of Hollywood to make sure they didn’t loose a technology war again.
We are now in another technology war, the war of the hypervisors. Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix and VMware all competing to dominate compute virtualization. I think it is likely that once again content will win through and currently Microsoft and Oracle, through their overwhelming software footprints, are executing on a pincer movement around VMware.
That makes the recent acquisition of SpringSource a Java developer platform very well timed. So the big open questions remain, who will be most successful at attracting and retaining the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and what about IBM?

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