This was clearly a major week for Microsoft announcements related to Virtual Client Computing. Here’s a list and commentary on some of the more important developments:

• Bob Muglia predicts ubiquity for desktop virtualization – Bob Muglia stated in the Virtualization Deployment Summit keynote address that while virtualization has currently only penetrated less than 1% of desktops, Microsoft does expect the technology to become ubiquitous. That’s a pretty strong vote of confidence.
• Calista Acquisition – there’s no way Microsoft would have acquired a company that’s sole focus is improving the fidelity of the Windows remoting experience if they didn’t believe that centralized client computing scenarios (Terminal Services, PC blades and server hosted VMs) were going to dramatically grow in importance over the next 3 – 5 years
• VECD price drop – this change shows that customers are telling Microsoft that not only are server hosted VMs becoming a critical scenario for client computing but also that current client OS licensing economics are impeding adoption of this model
• Virtualization rights for Vista Home SKUs – this development shows how important the client hosted virtualization scenario has become for consumers
• Office Support for Microsoft Application Virtualization – this change shows how important application virtualization has become in enabling flexible desktop computing

So all in all, it was a great week and things are clearly starting to change in Redmond. However, we still have a long way to go, especially in the area of client OS licensing, where we are still far from cost parity between licensing a traditional rich client and the alternate client computing scenarios.