Microsoft has an advertising campaign for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) running right now that is not exactly truthful. I happened to spot this banner ad on an RSS feed:
The ad claims that SCVMM can manage both physical and virtual infrastructure. That is flat out untrue. SCVMM cannot manage physical machines — period. It can barely perform any management tasks on the Hyper-V hosts under its control.
I’m sure the point they are trying to make is that if you deploy the entire System Center family (Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, etc.) you will have tools to manage both your physical and virtual machines — but that’s a far cry from VMM managing your physical systems. The advertisement omits information and misleads consumers. Is that allowed?
I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the Federal Trade Commission’s truth-in-advertising rules:
What makes an advertisement deceptive?
According to the FTC’s Deception Policy Statement, an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement – or omits information – that:
- Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and
- Is “material” – that is, important to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product.
What a stupid articule. Look, I am a huge VMware fan and I have seen tons of google links that show misleading information for VMware. But, to place this as false advertising means that the people that work at corporations don’t ask these questions. I like both companies virtualization stories and as a consultant, they both have their niche. VMware is looking more like a company that is scared of the competition versus doing what they do best.