VMware's awesome... but its roots are also in academia, the company was started by a Stanford professor and his PhD students. It seems like a circular argument

VMware's awesome... but its roots are also in academia, the company was started by a Stanford professor and his PhD students. It seems like a circular argument if the criteria of an academic project "successfully influencing industry" is widespread adoption but that adoption cannot be facilitated by a commercial entity. [As a side note -- the impetus for Xen, and also somewhat for VMware, was in a vision of global appliance-based computing, not in "virtualization research." I think that is really interesting given what just happened in this area in the last 3 or 4 years.]