As you may know, this week is VMWorld 2009, VMWare’s virtualization event for partners and customers. I’m not attending but I am following a great number of people on Twitter who are there and I have to say, it’s not doing VMWare much good in my eyes.

The first mark against them was the furore over the restrictions placed on Microsoft & Citrix. Yes-they’re competitors but:

• Banning them from sponsoring the event
• Restricting them to 10×10 booths
• Stopping them from doing demo’s of their product
• Stopping local hotels from renting conference rooms to them

just strikes me as childish and only serves to make VMWare look worse.

Now I’ll admit that I’m a big Microsoft fan and not much of a VMWare fan but I think even VMWare supporters must be having second thoughts

In one of the sessions today VMWare displayed a slide to demonstrate Microsoft driver crashes but the slide was 3 years old, and the data was 4 years old!

This attitude of “don’t show competing products", don’t use these rooms, don’t do this, don’t do that” is the same attitude that Microsoft were guilty of displaying a few years back. Microsoft saw a lot of people turn against them, both partners and customers, and it set them back in many areas. Microsoft had to make a real effort to change their corporate attitude from the top down and thanks to that, and the large number of loyal partners/customers, they were able to turn it around…these days MS are recognised by (nearly) everyone as much more open and accommodating to competitors and their products.

I’m not sure that VMWare will be able to make a similar change and, if they do, I don’t think it will be in time to save their market position…