Microsoft App-V, now fortified with Windows 7 support

LOL! Waethorn! LOL!

@panache: It's true. Companies that support legacy customers can only maintain a revenue stream from those legacy customers that also pay for an ongoing support agreement. Consumers don't typically pay for support agreements, so pushing upgrades is the only way to justify R&D expenditures in that space. It may be glib reality, but that's capitalism at its finest. "However, the big reason for the virtualization is to contain security plague software in a secured box." That depends really. If you have a network-aware legacy application, "sandboxing" it in a VM still won't isolate it entirely from the host platform. If a VM crashes, it may not take down the entire host OS, but then, application thread isolation is a similar method for dealing with buggy software, and it doesn't require virtualization. Also, a VM still requires a guest OS and if the application is buggy or insecure, it'll take down the guest OS as easily as it could a host OS running on hardware. How is that really any better? How is that any easier to manage? (tip: it isn't) If you want to take a birds eye view of the situation, application isolation and platform compatibility are the key goals of total application compatibility. How is that much different than the work that goes into making Windows backwards compatible, or more secure as it is today? (tip: it isn't) Whether you include older API's or run some sort of pseudo platform virtualization, the goal is the same, but the benefits don't differ much by doing it one way over another. The ideal way of dealing with software is to upgrade to something that's more secure and designed for that newer platform to which you're migrating. Why would you want to run old apps on a new platform, or old code on new hardware? Good IT people know how to align purchases with newer releases and vendor support agreements.

"MS needs to replace Virtual PC with a Hyper V compatible consumer version that allows the movement of VM's from a consumer host to a hyper v server" There's a major difference there. Virtual PC includes emulated hardware. Hyper-V uses virtualized hardware, but only for hardware that is supported by hardware VT. That excludes multimedia components. Even VMware Workstation uses emulated hardware. AFAIK it still doesn't support Aero (haven't tried it in a few months, but the initial versions of 6.5 didn't). Until virtualization gets to a point where all hardware can be fully virtualized (which is a complicated limitation of the x86 platform), it will have too many limits to be a relevant consumer technology. When it reaches that point, it still won't be relevant to consumers.