Everyone’s regrouping.

In one corner, Microsoft may have a winner after the disaster that’s Vista. We’ve looked at Windows 7 at http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/011509-win-love-hate.html#slide1, and then again this week at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030209-microsoft-windows7.html?hpg1=bn. It has a chance.

But Apple’s also releasing Snow Leopard, the Intel-only update to Mac OS, shortly. Microsoft’s most feared competitor only works on Apple hardware, and that leaves HP, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, and a raft of hardware makers happy. These hardware makers have been deeply disappointed in Vista sales, and they’re occasionally turned to variations of Linux.

One variation soon to arrive will be Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The glory of this version is all of the extra stuff Novell has written to do enterprise management of Linux desktops. If rumors and advanced features seen elsewhere are an indication, SLED (as it’s called), might be a low cost, high-feature way of beating Microsoft at their own game. Microsoft typically doesn’t like that, but Novell’s an arms-length partner of Microsoft in a number of lucrative cross-support endeavors.

And all of this might not make much difference, and here’s why. Application virtualization is becoming both stylish and is starting to meet the test of audit, security, and even availability metrics among the enterprise cognoscenti. An app for your desktop, no matter what it is, can be loaded out of the Internet as though the Internet was your local hard disk. The plumbing for this can be simple or complicated, but also entirely masked from users- and the guts live in ‘the clouds’. The clouds in this case are a rising number of Internet hosting organizations, now with a la carte offerings of varying server system hosts online. It’s getting very easy.

Even the desktop resources one uses are now becoming virtualized as well. No need for a fat hard disk and lots of processing power, when your netbook or notebook is getting the desktop and even application hosting on some way-fast machine sitting on the Internet. Accessibility goes way high. So do concerns regarding availability, security, and little things like audio and video virtualization.

Virtualized desktops tend to make operating systems somewhat irrelevant, as the one-operating-system-on-one-machine metaphor slowly starts to disintegrate. The wars are here. May the all-important users win.