Today we're making a series of announcements outlining our company-wide strategy for virtualization from the desktop to the datacenter.

For all the hype and excitement in the industry, the primary scenario of using machine-level hardware virtualization to consolidate server machines has been used on less than 10% of hardware servers. While virtualization started in server consolidation, it is only a small piece of the value offered by virtualization. Nowadays virtualization is not a single technology; instead, it is a collection of technologies that can be applied to all aspects of the server and the desktop. Less than 1% of desktops take advantage of virtualization and yet machine virtualization, application virtualization, presentation virtualization and even profile virtualization are upcoming virtualization techniques that when applied can increase the flexibility, business continuity, security and agility of desktop deployments. Application virtualization -- the notion of reducing conflicts between applications running on a single copy of Windows -- is especially important for the desktop and interest in this technology is very high. Microsoft Application Virtualization (technology we acquired and improved from the application virtualization leader Softricity) became the fastest-ever selling enterprise product at Microsoft, with four million units sold in less than a year. Profile virtualization enables users to take advantage of separating their documents and profile information from Windows, making it easy to get working again on a new machine in case of a stolen or dropped laptop. Presentation virtualization provides the ability to work remotely. More and more virtualization vendors are moving toward creating a comprehensive set of technologies that interoperate and are managed consistently, and we are strongly focused on providing customers with these solutions.