In stunning news VMware announced the reinvention of the wheel at the VMware World Conference in Las Vegas. They showed of their new “wheel” which will run slower and have a greater potential for security risks than the older wheel, but they feel that this is the way things are going to be in the future.

Of course the thing that VMware was showing off was not the wheel it was VMware’s Project AppBlast, an updated Horizon Application Manager (which now allows Windows Applications) and a new technology called ThinApp Factory. The theme was the “Post-PC Era” with CTO Steve Herrod saying such catch phrases as “the world has changed” and other nonsense considering the fact that Citrix has been out for more than 10 years and has never managed to push the PC to extinction.

The three technologies that VMware showcased today are not really new, Citrix has XenApp and even Microsoft has products that will allow you to serve up single applications to users. True the Microsoft product will not let you push out to anything other than Windows based systems but Xen can push to the iOS and even to Android in many cases. Xen also has a web interface that allows you to pick and choose the applications you want to run which are run in secured memory spaces on the client system.
We have tinkered with XenApp and XenDesktop on more than a few occasions and it is more than functional with plenty of support behind it.

So, while the new Applications from VMware are interesting they are far from revolutionary and with their expensive licensing scheme you can pretty much bet they will be pricing out of the reach of most companies.

Discuss this in our Forum