Seriously.
In an ITWire tale, Paul Harapin, VMware's managing director for Australia and New Zealand said Windows is already being replaced by virtual appliances running on Linux. In ten-years, there will be no more Windows.
OK. I know people at Red Hat who would say that that's exactly what will happen. That's right out of the new Red Hat KVM-based virtualization playbook. But, someone from VMware saying this? Wow.
Harapin went on to say, it is reported that "When you go to Cisco and say you want a router and a firewall, they provide you with an appliance."Inside that appliance is probably a bootstrapped Linux operating system that they manage themselves, there's memory and all sorts of devices. If something goes wrong with that appliance, you don't open up the router and try to determine whether it's an OS problem or a memory problem, you simply call Cisco and tell them that's there's a problem with your appliance."