I live in the UK and conciously chose to watch "Coming To America" (great film) instead of the £9.3 billion that they stole from us taxpayers for a 2 week long militarised running and jumping and clapping shitfest without our permission for which the cash could have gone to education, healthcare etc instead.
Sounds like someone whinging that they've got a little competition in their locked in content delivery store with another locked in content delivery store.
I think the guy's opinion is in line with the "popular internet opinion" but as usual that doesn't really match reality.
I deal with a lot of small-medium businesses in the UK, and the reality is as follows:
Chunks of VBA plumbing between Project, Excel, Word, Outlook powering lots of businesses, humming away on 2-3 year old Dell desktops under dusty desks in offices, written by people who don't understand or give a shit about "the cloud", "features" and "touch". A few of these places have a "server" (another dell wedged in a corner) or a few "servers" (3-4 dells or HP's possibly with exchange wedged under a desk and managed by a 3rd party). Most of this junk runs on hodge-podges of Windows XP, Vista and 7 with the odd Windows 2003 server. There are a few bespoke applications floating around but they are mainly knocked up in Access or VB6 and there are a couple of ASP.Net WebForms on internal servers with SQL Server or SQL Express. A couple of people have iPads (usually execs). Everyone has one or two phones. Work phones are mainly Android and Windows phones (CE and 7.5). Personal phones are all pretty much iPhones or Nokia feature phones.
A few things you don't see:
* Linux. Anywhere. Apart from a few of the cheaper organisations hosting it and their POP3 on a £2.99 a month hosting plan. They don't even know that as their "web design" company deals with all that.
* Office 365. People just don't trust it or complain it's too expensive or don't know it exists.
* Mac desktops or laptops. Never seen a single one, apart from one running Windows.
* Amazon or EC2. That's where we get our books from...
* Google apps. Nope not one.
That's the real world and they'll quite happily buy Windows 8 and use it as they have for the last N versions.
As the parent commenter and a previous resident (of Leyton), you've nailed it there. Our landlord upped our rent from 1000GBP a month to 1400GPB a month the moment it was announced.
I'll give you some ideas why it's an absolute fucking disgrace:
* Rapier missile launchers installed on residential flats.
* Dispersal Zone around Olympics which has kerfew, 42,000 strong mostly private police force and all legal rights suspended for residents and visitors.
* Armed drones patrolling the air around the site.
* Armed troops on site and the surrounding area.
* They built on Leyton Marshes which is common land.
* Warships have been stationed on the Thames.
* Transport disruption due to Olympic traffic lanes added and service alterations over the entire transport network (resulting in a 3 mile walk to take my disabled daughter to her physiotherapist - fun eh?)
* The fact that we have bankrupt hospital trusts which could have been bailed out several times over for that amount of money.
* The fact that NHS maternity and surgical services are turning people away and warning of serious disruption during the event.
* The fact that the Olympic village was promised for social housing. Out of 11,000 residences, 675 are going to it.
* There are branding police and official products which must be purchsed on site. You can't even take a flask of water with you incase they can't make money out of you.
* The fact that the political elite asked for the event despite polls taken at the time suggesting that the general opinion is that we didn't want it.
* The fact that "we're going to benefit from it", but there are no tangible benefits which are provable and every Olympic city has gone down the pan after the Olympics.
Ultimately, everything we expect and pay huge amounts for in tax is suspended for our political and corporate overlords. It's a militarisation exercise.
We run around 400 VMs across 44 (big scary) servers and I find that VMware only exists as a cop out for bad planning and bad architecture, albeit more cost effective than fixing it. It also shoots you periodically like 2Tb LUN size on our vSphere meaning we had to introduce mega-frigs to breach a 2Tb filesystem like NTFS links and sharding. 2Tb isn't much.
I think most enterprises are using as a big sticky plaster.
New VMware is probably more expensive than old vmware and it's expensive enough already. Every portrayed advantage of virtualisation is not cost effective when you have to pay their extortionate prices. Xen/KVM and HyperV have a serious advantage.
For ref, I currently have to babysit a large vsphere installation (44 hosts) and it's a money pit.
