The Monetization Scheme for Sun VirtualBox SUCKS

I left Windows almost a year and a half ago when I moved to Sun. I had been a Mac user for my last year at AMD but I kept it in the closet. There were dark days when I would "work from home" simply because doing a presentation or email was just easier on my Mac.

I got good - I installed VMWare Fusion and ran a version of Windows XP on my Mac setup with all the VPN and Exchange settings I needed to get into the network and do the stuff I needed. VMWare Fusion ran great, I loved it (for what it was) and all was good during the closet life. When I joined Sun I moved to Mac full time - thus making VMWare fusion an app I kept installed "just-in-case" I ever needed an archived file from my windows volume.

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Today I went to go download Windows RC 1 with the goal of testing it out on my Mac. Contrary to popular belief - I am not a diehard. I use whatever feels best and gets the job done. Currently that's a Mac but I am open minded.

I don't have VMWare Fusion on my new Mac. I figured I would download Sun's VirtualBox to try it out. I did work there for over a year - maybe I should give it a chance beyond OpenSolaris.

When I got to the registration screen it asked me to register for some nonsense optimization marketing brochure. Now I know marketing when I see it and signing up for anything silly like a "Optimizing your desktop using VirtualBox"technical guide is basically asking for Sun to spam me and perhaps for a sales person to call me.

It's an interesting tactic because it offers that it's Optional and there is a button to "Continue to Download" - what isn't clear is whether it's actually downloading or not and frankly it felt sleazy to me. If they have an Open Source product - they shouldn't be trying to scam my info with a silly marketing guide that's basically an invitation for a sales group to call me. They should be offering me real value - like paying them a small fee and getting an auto-update/security fix notification. Or maybe offering me drivers and tools for making Windows 7 better work.

One of Sun's biggest strategic bets was the idea that OpenSource software would lead to revenue for either the support packages around software or would drive hardware sales (where they make real margins).

I suggested, when I worked there, the idea that they should charge $1.99 or heck .25 cents -- something trivial (and I mean trivial) to download the software from a CDN and get some kind of easy auto-update feature. If they were really creative they would call Apple and get it setup on iTunes.

For now - I went back to VMWare Fusion (and signed up for the beta). They are upfront about charging me money for software and I feel like it's a good deal. They make it, I buy it and we all go home happy. Open Source is great but starts to loose its appeal when you know the company behind is just blatantly using it to monetize an offering that I probably don't want or need anyway.