Ron Oblesby's first day on the job at Unidesk. He decides to share his views on application virtualization and why it is not hugely popular today and why Unidesk / Atlantis' view is different.

End users (and potential buyers) of application virtualization ran into a huge list of items that weren’t supported or requirements that were just plain odd. Add into this mix the fact that you had to “re-package” the applications in a new way and couldn’t get rid of your “normal” application packaging and deployment mechanisms because App Virt didn’t support all applications, and you got a boatload of pushback on the technology.

This pushback basically led to application virtualization being used in targeted use cases. Citrix/Terminal Server admins still loved the technology, but even they found its limitations, and still had to create silos (killing my dream of silo-less environments). So App Virt fixed certain things, but wasn’t worth the time or cost to implement in all cases. Why?

I think the key to any solution to our desktop problems (read application and OS updates) has to address the core issues of the environment we live and work in. Like it or not we live in a Windows desktop world today, and are required to deal with it as best we can. Application virtualization missed the mark because of the following (in no particular order):

• App Virt required you to learn about the apps and learn a new skill set to deploy them. This killed interest in all but the largest deployments, since you had to have enough apps to make the investment in training your admins and understanding your app relationships pay off.
• App Virt could not support low-level applications such as anti-virus or services that needed to start at boot time.
• Patching of the OS essentially still had to be done “in the traditional way” and thus multiple deployment mechanisms needed to be retained.
• App Virt ‘broke’ links and dependencies and sometimes made packaging applications harder than it was before for those doing the packaging.
• App Virt had no solution for user installed applications and a clunky system for dealing with user preferences and settings.

The last bullet is the one I find most interesting. I am starting to believe that the next shift in desktop management is not going to be driven by management applications used in the enterprise. Instead the next shift will be driven by a solution that can be used by anyone. A solution that is transparent to the end user and works with both corporate and user-installed applications. Maybe this is just the “Mac user” talking inside my head, but if we look back at Server Based Computing and Application Virtualization, both of them solved specific problems in the desktop arena, but not in a holistic fashion. Application virtualization started out as a way to deploy applications, then grew into “virtualization” to solve the conflict problem. In both cases, these technologies worked around the limitations presented to them by the Windows desktop.

Source: http://blog.unidesk.com/virtual-desktop-management-blog/bid/10854/Why-application-virtualization-didn-t-turn-out-to-be-the-nirvana-a-lot-of-us-thought-it-would-be