At a point of its history VMware must have decided that leading the hardware virtualization market was not enough. To actualize its long-term strategy (whatever it is) the company figured out that it would need at least an additional layer of virtualization.
So, in January 2008, it acquired the US startup Thinstall.
The first rebranded version of Thinstall technology came out in July 2008 under the name of ThinApp 4.0.
It included a couple of interesting features (Application Sync and Application Link) but was not a groundbreaking major release.
After 8 months (or 13, if you start to count from the acquisition announcement) ThinApp just reached version 4.0.2 (build 3089), a bugfix release that came out earlier this week.
It’s well-known that most of the VMware focus now is on the release of vSphere 4.0 in Q2 2009, but given this lack of significant upgrades it’s legit to wonder if the company is encountering more challenges than expected in developing the Thinstall original code.
Or, maybe, VMware just believes that the market is not ready yet for application virtualization and then the ThinApp development stays in low priority for now.