It is widely entertaining to see IBM selling as a product something I used to run the IT infrastructure in a company for nearly 6 years. The only difference was that I ran Debian.

You can do all of that with an off-the-shelf linux distro. All you need is a master for the OS and set up $HOME via automounting.

...2009 is going to be the year of the Linux desktop ;)

"When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed .... Linux.... from theory to practice"

Maybe my memory is going as I get older, but I'm sure I've heard that sentiment before somewhere.

You've got to admire their optimism.

...Lotus! Yay! Er... wait. No.

Let's be honest.

Supporting a windows enviroment is easy and lowly paid. A quick call to an agency can bring a monkey over and he'll be able to support XP easily. Finding "good" linux staff is next to impossible.

We experimented 3 years ago with a trial run of 10 linux machines, and none of the IT support was happy supporting them. Even the only Linux enthuiast was having various configuration problems. The users also didn't like them in their Gnome desktop. Never tried KDE. Open Office was hated with venom by most users, especially using the spreadsheet.

I've yet to be convinced that linux is better value - I'd rather have 2 windows support staff for the price of a single linux support member - that's my view, I don't want to argue coz I wont be listening. na na nann nanannnannnaaa!

"Virtual printing"...? What's that then? File > Print Preview?

All hail the lowest common denominator, windows admin pricing.

I can't argue. Just disappointed. Idiocracy here we come.

Based on the story and the comments here it appears that folks believe that VMware will only run Windows. VMware View may run several flavors of linux from Gentoo, Suse, to RH. Not sure why this belief is out there. There are also several people that run their entire company on VMware ESX, VMware's server virtualization product. VMware View runs on the same ESX platform. Standardization is nice in that regard, taking advantage of the many sophisticated Management Tools - they are all leveraged in the desktop farm as well. Pound for pound I am sure that anything from IBM will not be less expensive than VMware when all is said and done.