Boy yesterday was discombobulating.  Right on the heels of the Face book acquisition of FreindFeed bringing into focus the discomforting thought that maybe I don’t have a clue what the word social means we have the acquisition of Spring Source by VMWare (aka EMC, aka VCE).

Spring Source has always seemed to me to be slightly conflicted about their exit plans: a bit of both built to flip and built to last.  And reading the tea leaves provided by their acquisitions didn’t seem to clarify that.  But clearly I wasn’t thinking about who might want to buy them.  Early on I thought Microsoft, but over time it became clear that Microsoft that was unlikely.  In retrospect I guess it’s obvious that somebody who aspires to be a player in the cloud computing platform space would be a likely buyer.

Aspires is probably the key word there.  After Amazon, and possibly Google, everybody else has only aspirations at this point.  An opinion that reflects my presumption that this is not a competition that’s well framed in the mindset of enterprise computing.

But the mix of proprietary and open that’s playing out in the cloud data centers needs more thought.  Can VMWare capture that platform hub?  Who are the significant other players aspiring to own the cloud computing platform.  EMC/VMWare/Cisco, IBM and Microsoft obviously, but are there others?  Are Redhat or  Canonical  acquisition candidates now?

Again these are very raw thoughts.  I remain confused.