A couple of years ago, i think somewhere in 2003, i realised that hardware virtualisation was the way to go. Whenever i talked with people about distributing and deploying applications with a virtual machine image instead of a traditional installer they laughed at me (or atleast gave me a strange look of disbelief). The availability of multiple machines can be represented in a windowing environment through a metaphor of multiple desktops. Anyway, i’m still convinced that there will be a point in time where users have access to multiple applications that run in their own virtual machine. Time will tell.