The Economist confuses an already confusing subject

The Economist (again) piqued my interest, this time with an article called "The Rise of the Hypervisor" (p74 of Jan 19th edition).

However, as is sometimes the case, I was struck by how long the article was, for so little effect. First, although I understand this stuff fairly well, I thought the article did a poor job explaining really what this is all about. Second, although they make two interesting points, they could have done so in a quarter of the space. Here is my four sentence precis:
A hypervisor is specialized software to make one computer act like several, or make several computers act like one. This is an important stepping stone to creating pools of computer resources that can be treated like a utility, available to be used as needed and shared (or shut down for power savings when not needed). Just as Microsoft benefited when IBM ceded the PC operating system to Microsoft in the 1980's, Microsoft may have already made the same mistake in hypervisor software by ceding the ground (although not as explicitly) to VMWare. Now Microsoft is thinking of giving away its own hypervisor for free, and that may lead, again, to more anti-trust lawsuits.

If you are interested in the world of Hypervisors, VMWare, Viridian, Xensource and the like, start here on Wikipedia.

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