VMTN Blog

Most people don't know I'm actually a trained scientist. (I said a trained scientist, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, which is why I'm making my living hanging out with bloggers.) My scientific training usually comes out in overly-long emails where I detail every assumption and caveat and mitigating factor about some conclusion, which is how you'd write a scientific paper. My marketing training then usually kicks in and I edit out most of it, but I still suspect I lose a lot of people in my more epic missives.

So I am officially a Doctor, I've done some statistics tutoring in the past, and this Fall I really got into the political polling geekery at FiveThirtyEight. As a result, I've developed a great respect for a well-made survey -- knowing what to ask, who to ask, and how to analyze the results are not trivial matters That's the main reason I'm not pointing to Alessandro's platform survey over at virtualization.info. It's not a scientifically valid survey of the global virtualization community, just a web poll, but I will be interested in the results. We'll "win" in any case, but I'm more interested in the results if I don't skew it by sending over hordes of VMware users from this blog.

(And I also recognize that just because you print a number doesn't make it true.)

However, there are some polls and surveys where we so clearly deserve to win on the merits that I don't mind calling your attention to them. Workstation wins lots of awards, because it remains the gold standard for desktop virtualization and is insanely useful to working developers and sysadmins. So for your voting pleasure I will direct your attention to the developer.com Product of the Year survey. VMware Workstation 6.5 is up for Development Tool of the Year. Feel free to vote your conscience, as long as you do it before December 15.