Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:
SWsoft today announced that Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft Architect and pioneer software developer, will serve the company as Senior Technical Advisor. In this capacity, he will assist SWsoft as a resource to the development team and advisor to senior management.
While at Microsoft, Zbikowski led efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company and the first employee to reach this milestone other than executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, used in MS-DOS executable files, and his initials “MZ” grace the headers of that file format. He is one of the main architects and developers of Windows NTFS, the most popular file system in use.
Zbikowski expertise is very interesting considering its new role in SWsoft. It’s evident that the OS virtualization vendor is working on a much deeper integration with Windows.
On top of that it’s worth to remember that SWsoft already includes several former employees from Redmond.
Last but not least there always is the long-term plan of acquiring an OS virtualization company for Microsoft, something that Bob Muglia said very clearly in June 2006.
Considering all these facts, it’s possible that Microsoft is preparing to acquire SWsoft (before its supposed IPO).