Cheesy movies are so quotable. The "landmark" news that Microsoft and Novell are going to be collaborating reminds me of a scene from Ghostbusters.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.

After the initial shock wore off and I started thinking about what this announcement really meant, one thing really came to the forefront. Virtualization. There are a couple of things that make me think that virtualization is a driving force here.

1) Many customers and companies I talk to, install at, etc. are diving deep into virtualization technologies. Most of them are using VMware (use it, love it, wish the support pages didn't give me the run around) but I know Novell has been putting a lot of weight behind Xen (haven't used it, want to).

2) For many years I've seen large companies reluctancant to deploy Windows servers in their data centers. I'm sure info from Microsoft would state the contrary and I have no stats to back that up. I just have my experiences with both ISV's and large companies. One ISV I was working with was switching their entire product from .Net to Java specifically because their target audience wouldn't use a Windows server in their production environment.

Given these two observations, I think Microsoft is evaluating all Virtualization offerings and figuring out how to make sure that they maximize their potential, especially if companies are more inclined to run their virtualization hosts on *nix OS's (VMware Infrastructure 3 is Linux based). If Windows works great with Xen, then there is still a chance that they can keep virtualized user desktops running MS software. A virtualized Windows 2003 server is probably easier to manage as well (if it dies, bring up the snapshot) so they may be able to open up new opportunities there as well.

From Novell's perspective, they need ways to catch up to VMware and hopping in bed with the juggernaut that is Microsoft gives them extra clout in pursuing their own objectives. I think the legal benefits that are a part of the agreement are really just a nice sales/marketing tool given the current legal landscape. Stormy has a very insightful post on that topic.

Only time will tell what really comes from this relationship. Now if only we could get more native Linux support for PC gaming.