Office Live Team

The purpose of VECD is to allow organizations to license Vista or other desktop operating systems to run in virtualized environments. I believe this is Microsoft’s initial attempt to capture licensing for the virtual environment and establish rules for deployment and purchase.

Additionally, traditional licensing language is oriented to a physical machine and in the virtualized world, physical does not exist, the OS rides on the virtual layer found just above the hardware (Hyper-V). Virtualized desktops are becoming a popular topic in larger organizations with thousands of desktops and many enterprises see this as a way to reduce the hardware costs associated with the traditional PC lifecycle. Vista has influenced this to some extent by significantly increasing the hardware requirements over XP.

However, given the rapid emergence of application virtualization, I wonder if the actual OS will really matter in the long run. I suspect that once MS office is hosted in the cloud, the operating system wont matter as much.

This does not eliminate the need for corporate control over the desktop whether its virtual or physical. After all, there are security , end-user support and licensing concerns that need to be addressed. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Vista in the world of cloud computing and how application virtualization will impact desktop platform choices for users and corporations in the future.

For more information visit Microsoft.com : http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/benefits/licensing.mspx