Virtualization, Bundling, and Browser Wars?

What do "Virtualization, Bundling, and Browser Wars" have in common. Well, an hour ago I would have probably said "What???!!!"

I feel a bit differently now.

The question on ebizQ's Cloud Computing forum today was about how private clouds is impacting the virtualization strategies of companies and referred to a blog posting by Mike Vizard.
Mike brings up a few very interesting points. However, what really grabbed my attention was the following statement:

"... Canonical this week partnered with Convirture to add an open source virtualization management platform to its Ubuntu distribution of Linux."

Now that is interesting. Imagine every operating system/platform with its own virtualization capability. Wait, it's already happening! Furthermore, the built in virtualization is optimized for the platform and vice versa.

Pretty cool, or is it?

Now think back to the time when Microsoft bundled its browser, IE, with its Windows Operating System.

If you can't recall, here's a refresher:

"United States v. Microsoft was a set of consolidated civil actions filed against Microsoft Corporation pursuant to the Sherman Antitrust Act on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 U.S. states who alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer. It was further alleged that this unfairly restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera)..."

Funny how history has a way of repeating itself. Let's just hope that in this case it stops repeating itself at the "bundling" part and not at the "billions of dollars spent in legal fees" part!

* Originally posted on the ebizQ Cloud Computing forum on November 4, 2010.