I am sitting here contemplating what does ECMF have to do with me?

Lately I have been really into the future of virtualization. The concepts that I have been learning in school really didn't sink in until I was thrown into it. It's funny how that works. I am not saying getting a higher education that you wouldn't learn anything. I am not saying that, you learn a lot. But what I am saying is that some people's passion goes beyond than what you learn from books. I can go to a French class everyday and learn the language. If I go to France then I can learn the culture and the language. What I am talking about here is Immersive Studies in Virtualization!

One trend that has become clear to me with all the cool hardware I get to see in my internship at Intel is that the hardware gets stronger while the size and power requirements gets small - and this is not going away. But one thing we have to realize, there is always going to be the equipment no matter what, and that equipment is going to have more and more features for us to pound on. Virtualization has been my new love, and not just for server consolidation, but application and desktop virtualization are the next killer ideas. The concept really sunk in after a few talks with Jason Davidson (my guide through the galaxy, you are my virtualization 42!) and also during the BriForum (I am still on a high from that one!!).

In my other blog series on the vPro Expert Center, I am on a journey of learning vPro (links), and feel like intellectually I am on a roller coaster ride of knowledge. Now that I am on this virtualization roller coaster I have to wonder how wild and crazy this ride will be - am I going to get off it alive? Application and desktop virtualization I believe will soon start to take over our lives.

As this old Commodore 64 advertisement below portrayed...25 years ago, people wanted to be the "movers of this world" with the power at their fingertips. This was typically used to simply play games and create a few documents. Now, 25 years later, the world has changed - we have mobility, we still have fun, but we stay connected. Yet, we are still on this ride of looking for the next faster, smaller, cute, reliable, and fun, device - it almost has to be our non-emotional twin.

The computer reflects who we are as a person. The applications that is on our systems fit to how we like them. Is it going to come to a point where we can just think of what we want and the computer will know automatically what it is? (I guess that's what Google is for but you still have to type it out) it's to the point where we won't need to have the computer in front of us. We will be able to talk into a "Bluetooth" type deal and all the information will come up on a mobilized screen in front of us. (Huh, okay nobody take that idea I am going to go out and patent it right now!!)

But now let's look at how application and desktop virtualization will deliver some of this for us... We moved from the floppy disk install to the cd/dvd install, and soon we will not be installing at all! A great reference is the video about St. Agnes Academy. (Check it out on Jason Davidson's area St. Agnes Prep School use Emerging Compute Models with Video.) Will the operating system become less important, and provide just the basics we need to launch any application in a virtual environment - an environment that we can have upgraded & managed with ease. Will future computer users never install application - but simply click the icon to launch them and boom you have it? How easy is streaming going to make things?

Add to this the vPro features and I can see a day when IT doesn't have to physically be in front of your computer to diagnose or fix it, and when it is broken you can migrate to a new one with some simple streaming...

Pretend for a moment that you had the opportunity to come up with anything in the world, anything at all. You had all the equipment and can make anything. What would be your item that you would make to revolutionize this world?