When we look at the competition in the IT industry there’s nothing that beats the marketing guerrilla we are experiencing in the virtualization space.
This is perfectly understandable considering that the vendor in control of the hypervisor is able to influence and in many ways able to control all the other companies that provide other pieces of the computing stack.
For the first time ever the absolute domain of the OS vendor is threatened by the hypervisor vendor so that the former tries to turn virtualization into a platform feature while the latter tries to impose the technology as absolutely independent.
It’s also true that compared to ten years ago the vendors have new tools to spread fear, uncertainty and doubts (FUD) against their competitors: paid bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so much more are available to influence the prospects and build armies of fanboys that are ready to overreact and defend their beloved products no matter what.
Nowadays is becoming increasingly common that marketing departments cross the line.
It’s much more uncommon to see a company that publicly apologies for a bad marketing action.
It’s the case of VMware which apologized for distributing a video of Microsoft Hyper-V crashing when its virtual machines were running a certain version of the proprietary VMmark benchmark platform.
The video, which was available here, was realized by the VMware Performance Team and uploaded on YouTube by Scott Drummonds, Technical Marketing Manager at the company.
Despite Drummonds is in the VMware Performance Team, where every aspect of the virtual infrastructure is taken deadly seriously, he didn’t publish any technical information about the test environment.
The lack of details unleashed a number of negative comments obliging Bruce Herndon, Senior Manager of R&D at VMware, to unveil that VMmark was executed inside Hyper-V virtual machines with unsupported configurations.
At the end of the saga Drummonds had to apology and Herndon had to admit that:
One of the more interesting emails I received pointed out that it unreasonable to blame Hyper-V for the collapse of these very large and very busy websites. Hyper-V’s stability issues would bring down individual VMs or small groups when the parent partition blue screened. I think that this is a reasonable observation, so its worth including here. I can’t say that Hyper-V was responsible for the MSDN and TechNet crashes. That would be for Microsoft to say, when and if they choose to expose the issue behind the outage.
Of course Microsoft couldn’t be happier to overreact: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.