Microsoft to buy Softricity?

http://channelweb.com/sections/allnews/article.jhtml?articleId=188100613

If this happens, this will be the best purchase that Microsoft have made in a very long time.

As most don't know them, Softricity's main product is Softgrid, which allows the best application-level virtualization on the market.  Softgrid, along with Altiris' really excellent Software Virtualization Solution, is a truly innovative product area that offers a totally different model for application deployment and maintenance.

For example, you could have several different versions of Office of your machine and they will wont ever see each other, let alone have problems with DLL Hell, because each application is "virtualized" on the platform

I've been dealing with these companies for last few months and its, by FAR, the most interesting area in system architecture/administration at the moment.

The rumour is that Microsoft will acquire them and announce a product called Virtual DLL at WinHEC - which allows virtualized registries for each application.

This stuff is very cool (still prefer Altiris's SVS though, and its free for personal use!)

Paula Rooney wrote:

“It allows you to have a virtual registry instead of a single registry so you have can have multiple DLLs sitting on the registry. The benefit for us is it removes application conflicts. With this, you can run Office 97 and Office 2003 on the same machine,”

... not that the registry was a bad idea, or anything...

It's interesting that the exciting new development with the Windows OS is a way to kludge around the problems created by a single global registry.

Cider wrote:

Wow! I'm shocked.

Or maybe not.

Given the calibre of your posts here, it hardly surprises me that you don't get even simple concepts in system administration.

Stick to the pointless Steve Jobs fellatio.

I get it. But you're still a jerk, Sammons.

It's sure a nice application to have, especially for testing application betas. And if Microsoft buys it up, better integration with Windows might just speed things up. And with Vienna, it's probably an integral part.

Also, installations might be easier. Just drop a package onto the disk and that's it. Done using it? Delete the package. Naturally that'd assume packages are managed with container file systems.

Tom Servo wrote:

Also, installations might be easier. Just drop a package onto the disk and that's it. Done using it? Delete the package. Naturally that'd assume packages are managed with container file systems.

That would be sweet!

edit: the following "fellatio" content added for Cider:

And somewht Mac-like.

And to leverage my own package filesystem concepts into this, patches would be additional packages, that override any files in the main package, however with the ability to merge the patches into the main file.

This would allow you to install a patch without hassles and also test it, and when it screws up, you delete the patch file to have it revert back to prepatch state.

Cairo wrote:



Paula Rooney wrote: “It allows you to have a virtual registry instead of a single registry so you have can have multiple DLLs sitting on the registry. The benefit for us is it removes application conflicts. With this, you can run Office 97 and Office 2003 on the same machine,”

... not that the registry was a bad idea, or anything...

It's interesting that the exciting new development with the Windows OS is a way to kludge around the problems created by a single global registry.

We uses SoftGrid in our organisation extensively, it has practically made regression testing a thing of the past!

The registry isn't a bad idea, it got us around the hundred's of ini files all over the place a problem we seem to be scream back towards but this time with XML.

Anyway I digress ...

The great thing about SoftGrid is that you can parcel up applications and run multiple version and there depencies on the same machine.

For example we are running multiple version of the same ActiveX control on one server in different SoftGrid instances!

OK so it's clever, but what makes this a killer app?

I will just say one word ....

Citrix

If just means that you can run any application on any Citrix server. Gone has the issues of certain applications only being able to run on certain Citrix server because it has a certain version of a certain control which for Citrix was a configuration nightmare.